Hacker News Reader

Comment by awoimbee | Hacker News Reader

Will this allow running linux VMs on any Android device ? Via something like nestbox: https://www.patreon.com/posts/74333551 ?

View on HN

This is already possible if your phones ship with the KVM kernel module, like on some Pixel devices, but reading the article suggests that KVM will become standard on all Android devices to enable this.

edit: according to this[1], yes, the pKVM functionality that's standard in Android exposes KVM functionality so that you can run VMs on Android.

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/android-13-dp1-google-pixel-6...

Which Pixel devices? Is it something new or not-so-new?

I couldn't tell you, sorry. Just going off what I've read in some articles like the one I posted.

A full linux environment (with external monitor support) sounds awesome. I hope that enabled KVM becomes standard

Would graphics acceleration work properly?

You can already to that with termux, XSDL and some scripts. No virtualization needed.

Depends on the kind of acceleration you want. VirGL is available on Linux host/Linux guest setups with recent kernels, not sure if QXL/SPICE will be available or can be added to the userland. Can't imagine a hardware passthrough situation making sense on a phone/tablet, either.

AVF supports this, people have used it to boot Linux and Windows. See for example https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1493089098944237568

Straight from the horse's mouth:

> pKVM is built on top of the industry standard Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) in Linux. It means all existing operating systems and workloads that rely on KVM-based virtual machines can work seamlessly on Android devices with pKVM.

It sounds like it will become common eventually. I just wish that there were a more supported pathway to running full VMs like that. These devices are powerful enough to do it pretty well now.

Are the VMs hardware accelerated?

Yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com