Android X86 virtual machine creating tool

[KOLANICH]

Project description

All we know that Android developers prefer not to use the bullshit hardware emulators for development because they are damn slow and resource consuming. The usual way to deal with the issue is installing Android X86 into a virtual machine and testing an app there.

Unfortunately it is a bit problematic.

To integrate Android VM with the PC properly one needs proper software on guest part intalled, and host properly configured, besides the proper configuration of the VM itself. It is nontrivial and error-prone.

Due to technical reasons anyhow usable Android X86 installations are possible only in Qemu. Android X86 doesn;t work well in VirtualBox because it is incompatible to its GPU passthrough, and without GPU passthrough it works damn damn damn slow.

We need a tool, lkiely written in python, doing the following:

1. discovering whether any Android VMs have already besn created in the system/user.
2. Check for the latest Android X86 ISOs, download them, automatically modify them for fully automatic installation and applying the settings needed for further driving the process.
3. Automatically create a properly configured VM and mount there the ISO
4. setup a dedicated host network interface to communicate with the VM
5. configure the VM to use that interface
6. create a FUSE mount into the guest FS through ADB protocol
7. provide a cokmand to automatically install and launch an apo within the guest

Relevant Technology

• QEMU and libvirt, and its bindings to python
• https://github.com/JeffLIrion/adb_shell
• https://github.com/rnjacobs/adbfs-rootless

Complexity and required time

Complexity

• Beginner - This project requires no or little prior knowledge of the technolog(y|ies) specified to contribute to the project

Required time (ETA)

• Little work - A couple of days

Categories

• Mobile app
• Frontend/UI
• Developer Tooling

[mihastele]

Hey @FredrikAugust can you assign this issue to me, I want to try to solve this. but you can replace me if I will not be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time...

[mihastele]

@KOLANICH I have been checking to get the android ISO image listen online, but it is not a trivial and I am not for sure if it is a legal task. Because when you install Android images from Android Studio, you have to accept terms before downloading the tools

[mihastele]

I propose regarding fetching latest images that we have some sort of custom image repo if Google allows to have it locally for dev purposes. On the other hand, I need to make sure how to work with IMG files, since I had't seen any iso images of the latest android devices. Am I doing something wrong?

[KOLANICH]

get the android ISO image

Here they are. https://www.fosshub.com/Android-x86.html It has nothing to do with Android Studio, it is a separate project.

[KOLANICH]

Also https://sourceforge.net/projects/android-x86/files/ and https://github.com/prebuilder/fetchers.py/blob/master/fetchers/discoverers/SourceForge.py can be helpful.

[mihastele]

Thank you!

[KOLANICH]

But IMHO the getting the images is the easiest thing. The trickiest thing is automatically create an isolated channel between the virtual machine and host. In order to use virtual machine built-in mechanisms one has to somehow build kernel modules for that machine, because it doesn't contain ones. So it is proposed to use adb. But in order to use adb, one needs a dedicated network between host and guest, we don't allow the guest to visit Internet and LAN and communicate with services on host by default. So one has to get familiar with NetworkManager API to create such an interface and setup QEMU through libvirt to use it and to provide a cli tool, one command of which set ups a FUSE FS into the guest, and another command gives a shell into the guest. It may require modifying guest FS directly in order to allow adb debugging.

[mihastele]

pasting an image of an issue regarding FOSSHUB downloading with WGET

[KOLANICH]

You will need an own script in python to download from fosshub. Feel free to reuse the code from https://github.com/KOLANICH-userscripts/surrogates.user.js/blob/gh-pages/FOSSHub.surr.user.js