gops

Author: Ludovic HENRY ludovic.henry@qti.qualcomm.com
Date: 2026-06-17
Scope: RISC-V (riscv64/linux) support status for gops
Audience: Technical leadership, resource allocation strategy
Verification policy: Every claim is cross-referenced to a primary upstream source. Items that could not be verified against a second source are marked [NEEDS VERIFICATION].

1. Project Overview

gops is a command-line tool for listing and diagnosing Go processes running on a system. It attaches to a running Go binary via a TCP agent (injected by importing github.com/google/gops/agent) and exposes runtime diagnostics: goroutine stacks, heap profiles, CPU profiles, GC stats, and Go version detection. It is used for ad-hoc process inspection, not production observability infrastructure.

The project is hosted under the google GitHub organization. It has no MAINTAINERS, OWNERS, or CODEOWNERS file. Governance is informal. The original author is Jaana Dogan (rakyll, Google) who created the project in November 2016 and was its primary contributor through approximately 2019. The de facto current maintainer is Tobias Klauser (tklauser, Cilium/Isovalent), who has handled CI, dependency updates, bug fixes, and Go version compatibility from approximately 2020 onward. There is no foundation affiliation and no RISE Project membership.

The project is not in the project-reports/scope.yml tracking list for this repository. No RISE blog post, RISE webinar transcript, or RISE wheel-builder listing references gops.

License: BSD-3-Clause.

Community stance on new ports: not applicable. gops has no architecture-specific code at any level; it does not require porting. Any platform that the Go toolchain supports (including linux/riscv64) builds gops without changes.

2. Port History and Upstreaming Timeline

Date	Event	Source
Nov 2016	Project created by Jaana Dogan (Google)	github.com/google/gops initial commit
2021	Dependency update for `windows/arm64` (gopsutil + go-ole)	Commit `e9831286` [NEEDS VERIFICATION - single source]
Jan 2026	v0.3.29 released (latest as of research date)	github.com/google/gops/releases/tag/v0.3.29

No RISC-V-specific commit, issue, or PR exists in the repository. A complete search of all 272 issues, 260+ PRs, and commit history returned zero riscv/riscv64 results. No porting work was required or performed; riscv64 support was inherited from the Go toolchain without any changes to gops itself.

3. Upstream Support Tier

No formal platform tier or support matrix is documented. There is no PLATFORMS.md, SUPPORT.md, or equivalent. The implicit policy is: if Go supports the platform, gops supports the platform.

Dimension	amd64	arm64	riscv64
Builds from source	Yes	Yes	Yes
CI coverage	Yes (ubuntu-latest)	Partial (macos-latest, which is arm64)	No
Official pre-built binary	No	No	No
Distribution packages	No	No	No
Release artifact	Source tag only	Source tag only	Source tag only

The project ships no pre-built binaries for any architecture. All GitHub releases (v0.3.25 through v0.3.29) have "assets": [] - empty asset lists confirmed via the GitHub releases API. The absence of riscv64 binaries is not a RISC-V-specific gap; it reflects the project’s source-only release policy.

4. Technical Architecture and RISC-V-Specific Subsystems

gops has 28 Go source files and no architecture-specific code of any kind. There is no assembly, no JIT backend, no SIMD dispatch, no crypto primitive implementation, no GC barrier code, and no ISA-specific build tags in the gops codebase itself.

Component	Description	amd64	arm64	riscv64
Process enumeration (goprocess/)	Uses `debug/buildinfo.ReadFile()` (Go 1.18+) to read ELF/Mach-O/PE generically	Full	Full	Full
Agent networking (agent/)	TCP socket with `SO_REUSEPORT` via `golang.org/x/sys/unix`; build tag `!js && !plan9 && !solaris && !windows` includes linux/riscv64	Full	Full	Full
Process statistics	Delegated to `github.com/shirou/gopsutil/v3`; uses generic `_linux.go` path on all Linux architectures	Full	Full	Full
Pre-Go-1.18 version detection	`rsc.io/goversion` contains an `amd64Matcher` assembly scanner with no riscv64 equivalent	Full	Partial [NEEDS VERIFICATION]	Gap (moot)

The pre-1.18 gap in rsc.io/goversion is not actionable: gops declares go 1.18 in its go.mod, making the legacy code path unreachable on any architecture under the current build requirements.

No ISA extensions (RVV, Zba, Zbb, Zbc, Vector Crypto) are used or relevant. gops performs no numeric computation, no cryptographic operations, and no memory-bandwidth-sensitive work.

5. Build System, Cross-Compilation, and Toolchain

gops uses the standard Go module build system. There is no CMake, no Meson, no Bazel, no Makefile, no Dockerfile, and no configure script in the repository.

Build commands for riscv64:

# Cross-compile from any host
GOOS=linux GOARCH=riscv64 CGO_ENABLED=0 go build github.com/google/gops

# Or install directly on a riscv64 host
go install github.com/google/gops@latest

Required Go version: 1.18 minimum (declared in go.mod). Go has supported linux/riscv64 since Go 1.14. All Go versions that satisfy the gops minimum (1.18+) include riscv64 Linux support.

CGO: Not required. The key dependency github.com/shirou/gopsutil/v3 explicitly tests GOOS=linux GOARCH=riscv64 CGO_ENABLED=0 in its CI lint matrix, confirming CGO-free cross-compilation works end to end.

QEMU: Not required for the build. QEMU would only be needed to execute riscv64 test binaries on non-riscv64 hardware; no CI or documented workflow uses it.

Known build failures: None. No build failure reports exist for any platform in the gops issue tracker.

6. Feature Coverage and Gap Analysis vs arm64 and amd64

Feature	amd64	arm64	riscv64
List running Go processes	Full	Full	Full
Attach agent and query stats	Full	Full	Full
Heap/CPU profile collection	Full	Full	Full
Goroutine stack dump	Full	Full	Full
Go version detection (Go 1.18+ binaries)	Full	Full	Full
Go version detection (pre-Go-1.18 binaries)	Full	Partial [NEEDS VERIFICATION]	Gap

The riscv64 gap in pre-Go-1.18 binary version detection is an inherited limitation from rsc.io/goversion (which only ships an amd64Matcher). In practice this is irrelevant: no production environment should be running Go binaries older than 1.18 in 2026, and gops itself requires Go 1.18 to build.

No functional gaps exist for the primary use cases on linux/riscv64. No floating-point semantics issues, NaN-handling bugs, or correctness regressions have been reported. Data not available: independent validation of process inspection correctness on actual riscv64 hardware.

7. CI/CD Infrastructure

The single CI file is .github/workflows/test.yml. Its runner matrix covers exactly:

ubuntu-latest (x86_64)
macos-latest (arm64 or x86_64 depending on GitHub runner pool)
windows-latest (x86_64)

Go versions tested: 1.18, 1.22, 1.23. The job runs go test -race -v ./... natively on each host. There is no GOARCH=riscv64 cross-compilation step, no QEMU emulation, no Docker-based cross-arch runner, and no self-hosted riscv64 runner anywhere in the file. The word “riscv” does not appear in the CI file.

CI dimension	amd64	arm64	riscv64
Native runner	Yes (ubuntu-latest)	Yes (macos-latest)	No
Cross-compile check	No	No	No
Race detector test	Yes	Yes	No
QEMU emulation test	No	No	No
RISE CI runner	No	No	No

No RISE CI infrastructure is involved with this project.

8. Distribution and Release Status

Pre-built binaries: None. All releases from v0.3.25 through v0.3.29 have zero uploaded assets (confirmed via GitHub releases API: "assets": []). This is universal, not riscv64-specific.

Package manager presence:

Channel	riscv64 status	Notes
GitHub Releases	Not available	No binaries for any arch
PyPI	Not applicable	Not a Python package
Debian	Not packaged	tracker.debian.org/pkg/gops returns HTTP 404
Ubuntu Noble	Not packaged	Only `golang-github-shirou-gopsutil-dev` (different project) found
Arch Linux (x86_64)	Not packaged	Only `gopsuinfo` (different project) found
Arch Linux RISC-V (archriscv.felixc.at)	Not packaged	No result
RISE wheel builder	Not tracked	Not a Python wheel

To obtain a working riscv64 binary:

go install github.com/google/gops@latest

This is the only supported path. It works on any Go-supported platform including linux/riscv64 with no flags or workarounds.

9. Dependencies

Dependency	Version	Role	riscv64 Build	riscv64 Test	riscv64 Release	Blocking Issues
Go toolchain	>= 1.18	Compiler, runtime, standard library	Full (since Go 1.14)	Native hardware CI exists (RVA22 bots)	All Go 1.18+ releases	Two CI bots broken as of April 2026 (issues #79068, #79069); no build blocker
golang.org/x/sys v0.30.0	OS syscalls, socket options	Full - 19 riscv64-specific files in unix package	No riscv64 CI runner	Ships in x/sys releases	None
github.com/shirou/gopsutil/v3 v3.24.5	Process/CPU/memory/disk stats	Full on Linux (generic `_linux.go` paths)	No riscv64-native CI; CI lint matrix includes `GOOS=linux GOARCH=riscv64 CGO_ENABLED=0`	Ships in gopsutil releases	FreeBSD/riscv64 only: issue #1425 (open since 2023-03-02, unmerged fix in PR #1652); Linux unaffected
github.com/spf13/cobra v1.9.1	CLI argument parsing	Full (pure Go)	Platform-agnostic	Ships regularly	None
github.com/xlab/treeprint v1.2.0	ASCII tree output	Full (pure Go)	Platform-agnostic	Stable	None
rsc.io/goversion v1.2.0	Go version detection in binaries	Full for Go 1.18+ binaries; amd64-only assembly scanner for pre-1.18 (unreachable)	Platform-agnostic for current code path	Stable	None
github.com/tklauser/go-sysconf v0.3.12 (indirect)	sysconf() wrapper	Full via x/sys	No riscv64 CI	Transparent	None
github.com/tklauser/numcpus v0.6.1 (indirect)	CPU count helper	Full (pure Go + x/sys)	Platform-agnostic	Transparent	None
github.com/go-ole/go-ole v1.2.6 (indirect)	Windows COM	Not used on Linux/riscv64	N/A	N/A	N/A
github.com/shoenig/go-m1cpu v0.1.6 (indirect)	Apple M1 CPU detection	Not used on Linux/riscv64	N/A	N/A	N/A
github.com/lufia/plan9stats (indirect)	Plan 9/BSD stats	Not used on Linux	N/A	N/A	N/A
github.com/power-devops/perfstat (indirect)	AIX perfstat	Not used on Linux	N/A	N/A	N/A
github.com/yusufpapurcu/wmi (indirect)	Windows WMI	Not used on Linux	N/A	N/A	N/A

The one open RISC-V issue in the dependency tree is gopsutil#1425, which affects disk stats on FreeBSD/riscv64 only. Linux deployments are unaffected.

11. Known Bugs and Active Issues

ID	Title	Status	Severity	Notes
shirou/gopsutil#1425	Missing support for riscv64 FreeBSD	Open (since 2023-03-02)	Low	FreeBSD only; compile-time failure for disk stats. Fix proposed in unmerged PR #1652. Does not affect Linux/riscv64.
golang/go #79068, #79069	linux-riscv64-rva22u64-mengzhuo bots broken	Open (April 2026)	Medium (Go CI infra)	Affects Go toolchain CI, not gops directly. Go builds for riscv64 remain available.

No correctness bugs, no riscv64-specific crashes, and no behavioral regressions have been reported for gops on any platform.

12. Objections and Upstream Blockers

None. Because gops contains no architecture-specific code, there are no porting objections to overcome, no technical blockers, and no organizational resistance. The project maintainer (Tobias Klauser) has a track record of accepting cross-architecture improvements given his background with Cilium’s Linux kernel work. If a riscv64 CI runner were contributed, acceptance probability is high [NEEDS VERIFICATION - based on maintainer profile inference, not a stated position].

The only upstream gap that could affect gops is the unmerged gopsutil PR #1652 for FreeBSD/riscv64 disk stats, which is not a gops-level issue and does not affect Linux.

13. Investment Analysis

RISE has not funded or tracked any work on gops. No RISE blog post, webinar transcript, or project listing references gops. All investment sizing below starts from zero.

13.1 Functional Enablement

No work required. gops builds and runs on linux/riscv64 today with go install github.com/google/gops@latest. There are no functional gaps on Linux.

13.2 Performance Optimization

Not applicable. gops is a diagnostic CLI tool that runs transiently. It performs no computation-intensive work (no numeric kernels, no cryptography, no SIMD-amenable loops). Performance optimization of gops itself has no meaningful impact on any workload.

13.3 CI/CD Infrastructure

The highest-value contribution is adding riscv64 to the CI matrix. This would provide early detection of any future regressions as Go toolchain and dependency versions change. The change is a single-file edit to .github/workflows/test.yml adding a linux/riscv64 cross-compile step with QEMU execution, or a self-hosted riscv64 runner entry. Effort is low; the primary dependency is access to a suitable runner.

13.4 Ecosystem Enablement

Not applicable. gops is a standalone CLI tool with no dependent package ecosystem.

13.5 Summary Table

Area	Work Item	Effort (person-weeks)	Owner	Priority
CI/CD	Add `GOARCH=riscv64` cross-compile + QEMU test step to `.github/workflows/test.yml`	0.5	Contributor to google/gops	Low
Upstream dep	Review and help land gopsutil PR #1652 (FreeBSD/riscv64 disk stats)	0.5	Contributor to shirou/gopsutil	Low

Total estimated investment: 1 person-week. Neither item is blocking for Linux/riscv64 deployments. The CI addition is the only item that provides ongoing regression protection. Both items are nice-to-have, not critical.

14. Updates

No updates yet – initial report dated 2026-06-17.