Android 17 for RISC-V Available for the RVA23 Profile Through Rise

RISE is pleased to announce the first Android 17 build on RVA23 hardware, delivered as part of an open source Android release for the SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX and Alibaba A210 EVB. This marks an important milestone for the RISC-V software ecosystem.

Led and funded through RISE as part of project RP024, the effort brought together RISE members SpacemiT and Alibaba DAMO around a shared software objective. Both partners contributed platform expertise and hardware, while BayLibre delivered the engineering work on an ambitious schedule, building on its previous Android port for the SpacemiT K1.

By providing a common framework for collaboration and funding, RISE helped turn platform-specific requirements into a reusable foundation for the wider ecosystem, demonstrating how coordinated investment can deliver greater value across hardware vendors and open source communities.

The RISE Android 17 v1.0 release is the source of truth for downloads and release information. It contains binary images for both supported boards, together with pinned source manifests, checksums, flashing tools, and rebuilding instructions.

The corresponding repositories and active development branches are listed in the RISE android_manifest repository. The release uses an open boot chain based on U-Boot and OpenSBI and an open source graphics stack built on the upstream Imagination kernel driver and Mesa. Source history and authorship are preserved, allowing the wider community to inspect, reproduce, and extend the work.

This is an open source developer release, not a production-ready or certified Android build. Important work remains before Android on RISC-V is ready for commercial products, but this release establishes a concrete foundation for that journey.

The next phase will turn this release into a continuously built and tested OSS platform.

The second phase of RP024 will automate the build, hardware testing, and release processes for Android 17 directly from the RISE Android manifest repository. Testing will begin on Alibaba A210 systems already available in the RISE Board Farm. SpacemiT K3 systems will be added in the coming weeks, after which the same Android CI workflows will run on both platforms.

Android will be one of many users of the RISE Board Farm. The infrastructure is intended to give open source projects access to automated testing on real RISC-V hardware, helping developers find regressions earlier and maintain software continuously across a growing range of systems.

RISE also expects follow-up RFPs to enable and optimize key parts of the Android software stack for RISC-V, including Bionic, BoringSSL, ART, V8, Chrome, and multimedia libraries. In parallel, RISE is strongly encouraging hardware vendors to upstream their platform support to the Linux kernel, U-Boot, and OpenSBI, with the goal of eliminating platform patches currently maintained in RISE repositories.

This release demonstrates what becomes possible when hardware vendors, engineering organizations, and open source communities invest together. Shared work reduces duplication, spreads cost and risk, and produces results that are more reusable than isolated platform ports.

RISE invites hardware vendors to add their platforms to the automated Android build, test, and release workflows. We also invite organizations with shared software needs to join RISE and help fund work that would be prohibitively expensive to deliver independently, but can create broad, cross-industry value when pursued together.

Organizations interested in contributing hardware, participating in the CI effort, or joining RISE should contact a RISE representative or email info@riseproject.dev.