The RISC-V ISA is commonly divided into two architectures, namely RV32 and RV64, covering 32-bit and 64-bit register sizes respectively. And although the RV64 standard is not yet fully RV32-compatible, the two are, except from some minor divergences, closely associated products of the same family. In fact, it took some
Android is just Linux with some patches and a crappy userland sprinkled on top. Why should you not be able to run whatever you want if the bootloader isn’t locked? Pine64 tries to use components that have a documentation you can access without an NDA. If you want a libre smartphone you are fucked anyways since you’ll have trouble finding a modem that doesn’t require loading a non-free firmware :(
Non-free device drivers that only work with outdated kernel versions are the main problem with porting GNU/Linux to Android phones. You can try to patch around that for a while with compatibility layers like Halium, but usually not very long.
No, you need hardware to be designed on purpose to work with FLOSS OSes. Pine64 does a lot of work to select the correct hardware for this.
Android is just Linux with some patches and a crappy userland sprinkled on top. Why should you not be able to run whatever you want if the bootloader isn’t locked? Pine64 tries to use components that have a documentation you can access without an NDA. If you want a libre smartphone you are fucked anyways since you’ll have trouble finding a modem that doesn’t require loading a non-free firmware :(
Non-free device drivers that only work with outdated kernel versions are the main problem with porting GNU/Linux to Android phones. You can try to patch around that for a while with compatibility layers like Halium, but usually not very long.