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Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it is that widely available due to Snapdragon chips not supporting some feature it requires.

Good option for Pixel owners or phones with MediaTek chips though.

Apparently it's about software, not hardware - Qualcomm recommends running Android under a virtual machine (which lacks nested virtualization support).

Is this for real? Do you have any more info on this? It seems crazy to me given how popular their chips are and how many problems I’d imagine this creates

Using an S24 here and yeah, not available with Android 16

But the S24 wasn't Qualcomm but Exynos. Weird.

It shouldn't be problematic if the processor supports it well. For example modern Windows is always running as a VM and people are barely aware of that.

That’s a good point, I forgot windows typically runs on top of hyperV

Some more info in this comment and good search terms for further research as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091082

The other HN comment already has some info, but from what I remember from r/android threads, it's because qualcomm doesn't allow unsecure (sic? unencrypted?) VMs, which, ironically, are needed to run nested Linux.

Disclaimer, my memory on the exact terminology is extremely fuzzy. But pixels with tensor can run it just fine. And it's purely a software thing too, btw.

It should work fine for any Android phone with pKVM support. It runs Debian in a VM, with some kind of Wayland trick (using virgl for GPU acceleration) to get GUI support.

pKVM requires a) a compatible CPU (most CPUs will do, probably), b) compatible firmware/bootloader software, and c) a compatible Android build

The latter two parts are the most likely reason why not all phones have support for this.

IIRC Qualcomm smartphone SoCs have always run some kind of hypervisor, I believe it's to allow partitioning of the CPU cores with the modem/DSP.

They used to (mid-late 2000s) use an L4 derivative ("REX"?), with the more recent chips (including the 'X' series for PCs) using their homegrown "Gunyah" hypervisor (https://github.com/quic/gunyah-hypervisor)

Would be interesting if you know of any evidence about being an architectural hw limitation. Though of course the practical difference may be small if the DRM bootloader enforces loading the hypervisor through cryptographic checksums. But I guess if a customer asked they would allow it and the hardware could do it.

I run LineageOS on both a Pixel 3a XL and a OnePlus 5. Yes, these both run Snapdragons.

The option to install the subsystem is present on both, but I have not attempted it.

I have loaded it onto a Pixel 6a running Graphene.

The option is available, but it probably won't work (show some error that the chip should allow unsecure VMs)

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