First some background, then a question. Recently, due to my laptop becoming non-usable for mobile work, I've been taking much more advantage of my Android phone. Paired with a usb Lenovo compact thinkpad keyboard w/ track-point, and it's surprisingly very usable, the track point giving me a mouse courser and keyboard on a single USB-OTG connection. What I have found is that while you can almost use it as a desktop, it's clearly not, and you won't get the same efficiency of use. But it's led me thinking that this device is in many respects more powerful then my sub-notebook laptop (less the RAM). So the question. What have people done to run virtual machines on their Android phones? A few years ago I had tried out Limbo PC, which was a QEMU port to run x86 machines on your phone. You loose a lot of performance in the instruction set translation. I know the major Distro's have very robust ARM package sets at this point, so I'd look at running a native Linux in visualization. http://linuxonandroid.org/ This comes up in searches, but on the surface looks like their using a chroot method. Hmm... which I hadn't considered. -- Scott Sullivan
I'd imagine that it should be conceivable to run Docker, and that THAT would be a preferable approach, involving running ARM code as opposed to x86 code (because emulation would be hyperexpensive). There certainly is a port of Docker to RPi < https://resin.io/blog/release-docker-0-7-2-for-arm/>, which points towards it being plausible to use Docker on various Linux distributions that run on RPi. It's an interesting question whether or not that's much use for more mobile devices, e.g. - whether or not they're running similar enough instruction sets. I wouldn't expect the other virtualization approaches to work out terribly well; they tend to be hungry for memory and storage space, which are exactly the things you don't have plenty of on phones/tablets. (Leave aside the thought that some of the virtualization systems require hardware support that's unlikely to be present on ARM.) Here's a bit of description on what's good/bad about Docker on Raspberry Pi... http://blog.xebia.com/2014/08/25/docker-on-a-raspberry-pi/
Docker would certainly be nice. Alas, the best I've come up with so far to get Linux running on Android is with GNURoot. This gets me a mostly-working Debian environment with X, twm, apt-get etc. I whipped up some preliminary notes yesterday <https://gist.github.com/psema4/c1545694272b1939b429> (includes links) but there are some notable issues: - This isn't really a tutorial yet; it's more a collection of notes - There are some significant issues, like not being able to run xterm That said, some simple X apps like xeyes & xclock run fine when run from the terminal. GNURoot is similar in some ways to linuxonandroid but it doesn't require root (likely the source of a number of errors noted in my gist). LOA is fairly decent if all you need is a shell but my experiences with X were quite awful (it was unusably slow) There are plenty of VM's on the market for older, smaller machines. Haven't seen much for x86 though :( On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 12:29 AM, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com> wrote:
I'd imagine that it should be concei:vable to run Docker, and that THAT would be a preferable approach, involving running ARM code as opposed to x86 code (because emulation would be hyperexpensive). <snip>
-- Scott Elcomb @psema4 http://psema4.com/pubkey.txt http://www.pirateparty.ca/
participants (3)
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Christopher Browne -
Scott Elcomb -
Scott Sullivan