seesaw

Author: Ludovic HENRY ludovic.henry@qti.qualcomm.com
Date: 2026-06-17
Scope: RISC-V (riscv64/linux) support status for seesaw
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

google/seesaw is a Linux Virtual Server (LVS) based load-balancing platform written entirely in Go. It provides anycast load balancing using BGP (via Quagga), IPVS kernel forwarding, and health checking. The project is licensed Apache-2.0 and is explicitly disclaimed as “not an official Google product,” though it originates from and is hosted under the Google GitHub organization.

Governance: Ad-hoc benevolent maintainer model. No MAINTAINERS file, no OWNERS file, no CODEOWNERS, no steering committee, and no formal governance charter. Contributions require signing Google’s CLA (individual or corporate). The project is in maintenance mode: all commits since late 2023 are automated Dependabot security bumps. The last substantive code change was a netlink test fix in April 2023 [NEEDS VERIFICATION].

Corporate sponsors: All top contributors appear to be current or former Google engineers based on project origin and org placement, though none list Google explicitly in their public GitHub profiles. Active maintainer Hazael Sanchez (hazaelsan, Dublin, Ireland) has merged all recent PRs. Yuan Liu (liuyuan10) was the top historical contributor (61 commits, 2019-2021). Joel Sing (4a6f656c) authored the founding commit on 2015-12-07.

Community culture on new ports: No stated policy exists. Given the maintenance-mode state (activity is exclusively Dependabot PRs reviewed by one maintainer), no new architecture ports have been discussed or proposed. The Go toolchain already targets linux/riscv64, so no language-level porting work exists; the barrier is CI infrastructure and CGo dependency availability.

RISE membership: Google LLC is a RISE Premier Member, but seesaw is not listed as a RISE project and does not appear in any RISE workgroup output or wheel builder listing.

Repository stats: Created 2015-12-04, last push 2026-07-11, 227 commits, 5,676 stars, 506 forks, 16 open issues.

2. Port History and Upstreaming Timeline

Date Event Source
2015-12-07 Repository created; initial commit by Joel Sing github.com/google/seesaw
2015-2021 Active development; no architecture-specific work of any kind Commit history
2023-present Maintenance mode; Dependabot bumps only Commit history
Never RISC-V port proposed, discussed, or attempted GitHub issue/PR/commit search: 0 results

No RISC-V port exists. A search of all 227 commits, all issues, and all PRs returned zero references to riscv, riscv64, or RISC-V. No contributor has proposed a port.

3. Upstream Support Tier

No formal platform tier policy exists. The project has no PLATFORMS.md, SUPPORT.md, or equivalent document.

Implicit support tier from CI evidence:

Platform CI Release binaries Tier
linux/amd64 Yes (ubuntu-18.04, Go 1.18/1.19) None (0 releases ever published) Development/build only
linux/arm64 No None Unsupported
linux/riscv64 No None Unsupported

The CI pipeline (.github/workflows/ci.yaml) runs only on ubuntu-18.04 (x86_64). The protoc binary downloaded is hardcoded as protoc-3.7.1-linux-x86_64.zip, confirming x86-only intent. No GitHub releases have ever been published for any architecture.

4. Technical Architecture and RISC-V-Specific Subsystems

The entire seesaw codebase is pure Go with two CGo packages. There is no assembly, no SIMD, no JIT, no hand-tuned cryptography, and no architecture-specific code of any kind – not for amd64, arm64, or any other target.

Component breakdown:

Component amd64 arm64 riscv64 Notes
LVS engine (engine/) Pure Go Pure Go Pure Go (untested) No arch-specific code
IPVS bindings (ipvs/) CGo, linux/ip_vs.h CGo, linux/ip_vs.h CGo, linux/ip_vs.h (untested) Architecture-neutral C headers
Netlink bindings (netlink/) CGo, libnl3 CGo, libnl3 CGo, libnl3 (untested) libnl3 unavailable in Debian stable riscv64
Health checking (healthcheck/) Pure Go Pure Go Pure Go (untested) No arch-specific code
BGP/routing (quagga integration) N/A (external) N/A (external) N/A (external) Quagga is a separate daemon
Assembly (.S files) None None None Zero .S files in repository
SIMD None None None No compute-intensive hot paths
Cryptography None (stdlib) None (stdlib) None (stdlib) No custom crypto

The CGo unsafe.Pointer patterns in netlink/message.go (casting over C structs struct_nl_msg, struct_nl_sock) and in ipvs/ipvs.go (uint32 reinterpretation via byte-level type punning for ServiceFlags) are architecture-sensitive in principle but use only standard C types. They have not been validated on RISC-V hardware.

ISA extensions: None required or used. The project has no SIMD, no vector, no cryptographic acceleration, and no use of any RISC-V ISA extensions (RVV, Zba, Zbb, or other).

5. Build System, Cross-Compilation, and Toolchain

Build system: Go modules (go.mod, go 1.25.0) with a minimal Makefile. No CMake, no Dockerfile, no cross-compilation toolchain files.

Build commands:

go build ./...        # build all packages
go test ./...         # run all tests
make install          # installs binaries to $GOPATH/bin

riscv64 cross-compilation requirements (CGo is required; pure GOARCH=riscv64 is insufficient):

  1. riscv64-linux-gnu-gcc cross-toolchain (GCC or Clang with riscv64-linux-gnu target)
  2. libnl-3-dev and libnl-genl-3-dev for riscv64 sysroot (netlink/cfuncs.go requires these)
  3. CGO_ENABLED=1, CC=riscv64-linux-gnu-gcc, GOOS=linux, GOARCH=riscv64
  4. CGO_CFLAGS pointing to riscv64 libnl3 headers at /usr/include/libnl3

Constraint: libnl-3-200 is not available in Debian bookworm (stable) or Debian trixie for riscv64. It is available in Debian sid (unstable) at version 3.12.0-2+b1. This means seesaw cannot build on riscv64 Debian stable without sourcing libnl3 from sid or building it from source.

The CI workflow downloads protoc-3.7.1-linux-x86_64.zip and would need updating to build protoc from source (no official riscv64 protoc binary exists) for any riscv64 CI job. This affects only the make proto code-generation step, not runtime binaries.

No minimum GCC or Clang version is specified by the project. No QEMU usage is documented anywhere in the repository.

6. Feature Coverage and Gap Analysis vs arm64 and amd64

Feature amd64 arm64 riscv64
LVS load balancing Yes (untested in CI at release) Not tested Not tested
IPVS kernel forwarding Yes Not tested Not tested
Netlink configuration Yes (libnl3 available) Not tested Blocked (libnl3 absent in Debian stable)
BGP anycast (Quagga) Yes (external dep) Not tested Not tested
Health checking Yes Not tested Not tested
NCC (network control) Yes Not tested Not tested
SIMD acceleration N/A N/A N/A
Floating-point semantics N/A N/A N/A

Functional gaps for riscv64:

  • No gap at the Go source level; the codebase is fully portable.
  • One concrete gap: libnl3 unavailable in Debian stable riscv64. The CGo unsafe.Pointer patterns in netlink/message.go and ipvs/ipvs.go are untested on RISC-V and warrant validation.

Performance gaps: None expected. The project has no architecture-specific performance optimizations on any platform. Network packet forwarding is handled by the Linux kernel IPVS subsystem, not by seesaw user-space code.

Security hardening gaps: Data not available: no security hardening configuration (PIE, stack canaries, CFI) is documented or specified for any platform.

7. CI/CD Infrastructure

Single CI file: .github/workflows/ci.yaml. No other CI configuration exists (.gitlab-ci.yml, Jenkinsfile, .cirrus.yml are all absent).

CI aspect amd64 arm64 riscv64
Runner ubuntu-18.04 (GitHub-hosted) None None
Go versions tested 1.18, 1.19 N/A N/A
Build check Yes (go build ./...) No No
Test with race detector Yes (go test -cover -race ./...) No No
Protobuf generation Yes (protoc x86_64 binary) No No
QEMU emulation No No No
RISE runners No No No
Hardware boards No No No

The string “riscv” does not appear in any of the 188 files in the repository. There is no RISC-V CI of any kind.

8. Distribution and Release Status

GitHub releases: Zero releases have ever been published at github.com/google/seesaw/releases. No binary artifacts exist for any architecture.

Distribution packages:

Distribution Package riscv64 status
Debian Not packaged (tracker.debian.org returns 404) N/A
Ubuntu noble Not packaged (no result in packages.ubuntu.com) N/A
Arch Linux RISC-V Not packaged (archriscv.felixc.at returns no result) N/A
PyPI Unrelated project (seesaw 0.10.3 is a web archiving tool, source-only) N/A

What a user must do to get a working riscv64 binary:

  1. Source libnl3 from Debian sid or build from source (libnl 3.12.0+).
  2. Install riscv64-linux-gnu-gcc cross-toolchain.
  3. Clone the repository and run CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=riscv64-linux-gnu-gcc GOOS=linux GOARCH=riscv64 go build ./....
  4. Deploy to riscv64 Linux hardware and validate the netlink and IPVS CGo code paths manually.

No pre-built path exists for riscv64.

9. Dependencies

Dependency Role riscv64 build riscv64 test riscv64 release Blocking issues
Go runtime (golang/go) Compiler and runtime Supported (linux/riscv64 first-class) Partial: 3 RVA22 hardware bots broken in CI (Jun 2026); gotip build failures (#70401) Go 1.25 ships linux/riscv64 #70401, #79067-#79069 (builder infra); not a correctness blocker
libnl3 (thom311/libnl) Netlink socket C library (CGo) Arch-neutral; compiles on riscv64 No riscv64 CI libnl-3-dev available in Debian sid only (not stable/trixie) Blocking: absent from Debian stable riscv64
google.golang.org/protobuf Protocol Buffers runtime Pure Go, builds on riscv64 No riscv64 CI Portable (v1.36.12) None
github.com/golang/protobuf Legacy proto v1 shim Pure Go No riscv64 CI Portable None
golang.org/x/crypto TLS, SSH, crypto primitives riscv64 assembly exists for poly1305 (sum_riscv64.s) No riscv64 CI Portable Go module None
golang.org/x/sys Syscall wrappers Comprehensive riscv64 support (syscall_linux_riscv64.go, asm_linux_riscv64.s, zerrors, ztypes, cpu files) No riscv64 CI Portable Go module None
golang.org/x/net HTTP/2, DNS, networking Pure Go (via golang.org/x/sys) No riscv64 CI Portable Go module None
github.com/miekg/dns DNS client/server Pure Go No riscv64 CI Portable None
github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify Filesystem event notifications Pure Go with OS-specific backend via golang.org/x/sys No riscv64 CI Portable None
github.com/golang/glog Leveled logging Pure Go No riscv64 CI Portable None
github.com/dlintw/goconf Config file parser Pure Go No riscv64 CI Portable None
github.com/kylelemons/godebug Test diff helper Pure Go No riscv64 CI Portable None

Critical path: The only concrete blocker is libnl3 availability on riscv64 Debian stable. All pure-Go dependencies have zero known riscv64 issues. The Go toolchain itself has infrastructure-level CI instability on riscv64 hardware (goroutine and builder bots), but released Go 1.25 is stable for linux/riscv64.

The protoc binary used in make proto has no official riscv64 prebuilt (protoc ships x86, arm64, ppc64le, s390x, x86-32 only); building protoc from source on riscv64 requires Abseil-cpp. This affects only code generation, not runtime builds.

11. Known Bugs and Active Issues

ID Title Status Severity Notes
- No riscv64-related issues exist - - GitHub search across all issues returned 0 results for riscv, riscv64, or RISC-V

All 16 open issues are unrelated to RISC-V or architecture portability. No correctness bugs for riscv64 are filed because the project has never been tested on riscv64.

The Go toolchain issues (#70401, #79067-#79069) are in the upstream Go repository, not seesaw itself. They affect CI builder infrastructure, not released Go 1.25 correctness.

12. Objections and Upstream Blockers

Technical blockers:

  1. libnl3 absent from Debian stable riscv64. The project’s CGo dependency on libnl-3-dev and libnl-genl-3-dev cannot be satisfied from Debian bookworm or trixie riscv64 package repositories. Available in Debian sid (3.12.0-2+b1). This is the primary build blocker.

  2. CI infrastructure uses ubuntu-18.04 with hardcoded x86_64 protoc binary. Adding riscv64 CI requires replacing the protoc download with a source build and adding a riscv64 runner (QEMU or hardware).

  3. CGo unsafe.Pointer patterns in netlink/message.go and ipvs/ipvs.go have not been validated on RISC-V. The patterns are architecture-neutral in design but require runtime validation.

Organizational blockers:

The project is effectively unmaintained for new features. The sole active maintainer (Hazael Sanchez) reviews only Dependabot PRs. The probability that a riscv64 CI addition would receive timely review is low [NEEDS VERIFICATION] based on the pattern of recent activity.

Stated objections: None filed. No contributor has raised riscv64 support as a topic in any issue or PR.

Acceptance probability: High for a well-formed PR that adds riscv64 CI and documents the libnl3 build dependency, given the absence of any stated objections and the trivial code change required (Go already supports linux/riscv64). The organizational risk is slow review cadence, not technical rejection.

13. Investment Analysis

13.1 Functional Enablement

The Go codebase requires zero changes. Work is limited to:

  • Resolving the libnl3 Debian stable gap (either by contributing packaging, using sid, or sourcing from a buildroot/sysroot)
  • Validating CGo unsafe.Pointer behavior on riscv64 hardware for the netlink and IPVS packages
  • Updating the CI YAML to add riscv64 (replace hardcoded x86 protoc, add GOARCH=riscv64, provide CGo sysroot)

13.2 Performance Optimization

Not applicable. The project has no architecture-specific performance code on any platform. Load balancing decisions are handled by the kernel IPVS subsystem. No riscv64 optimization work is warranted.

13.3 CI/CD Infrastructure

Add riscv64 CI job to .github/workflows/ci.yaml:

  • Build protoc from source (or use buf CLI which ships riscv64 binaries) [NEEDS VERIFICATION]
  • Add GOOS=linux GOARCH=riscv64 CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=riscv64-linux-gnu-gcc environment
  • Source libnl3 riscv64 headers (from Debian sid sysroot or buildroot)
  • Use QEMU user-mode or hardware runner for go test

13.4 Ecosystem Enablement

Not applicable. seesaw has no dependent package ecosystem, no plugin system, and no distribution packages on any platform. Section 10 is omitted per scope rules.

13.5 Summary Table

Area Work Item Effort (person-weeks) Owner Priority
Functional Validate CGo netlink/IPVS unsafe.Pointer on riscv64 hardware 1 Qualcomm/RISE High
Functional Resolve libnl3 riscv64 Debian stable gap (sid sysroot or source build) 1 Qualcomm/RISE High
CI/CD Add riscv64 CI job (GOARCH matrix, CGo sysroot, protoc replacement) 1 Qualcomm/RISE Medium
CI/CD Submit CI addition PR upstream and drive review 1 Qualcomm/RISE Low
Performance riscv64 optimization 0 N/A Not warranted

Total estimated effort: 4 person-weeks to achieve a verified, CI-gated riscv64 build and test pass.

Context: Google is a RISE Premier Member, but seesaw is not a RISE project and receives no RISE investment. No work has been done or funded for seesaw riscv64 support by any party.

14. Updates

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

15. References