LWN: Comments on "Anbox - Android in a Box"

Anbox - Android in a Box

paulj — Wed, 31 May 2017 15:45:26 +0000

Actually, the distributor is obliged to "conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice .. and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License
along with the Program".

An end-user may never need to care about having to comply with the GPL, however they /do/ have to be informed about the fact they have rights under the GPL to the software they have received from the distributor.

Anbox - Android in a Box

nix — Wed, 31 May 2017 13:33:11 +0000

The android AI link comes complete with a copy of the 'GNU GENERAL PUBLIC End User License Agreement', which suggests that whoever laid out that website needs a bit of re-education: the GPL constrains redistributors, not end users, who don't even need to know it exists.

Anbox - Android in a Box

marcH — Wed, 31 May 2017 03:51:05 +0000

Some relevant links...

https://01.org/android-IA
https://lwn.net/Articles/701964/
https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2017/05/18/intel-e...

Anbox - Android in a Box

excors — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 11:59:39 +0000

There were enough non-x86-compatible apps that Intel thought it worthwhile to develop and maintain an ARM-to-x86 binary translator for Android (called Houdini).

Maybe awareness of x86 devices is growing and maybe more-recently-developed apps are more likely to build for x86. If developers are testing in the official Android emulator then it's also worth building for x86, since the x86 version of the emulator is hugely faster than the ARM version.

But on the other hand, since Intel gave up and cancelled most of its Android-compatible smartphone and tablet SoCs last year, I suspect their market share isn't shifting anywhere but downwards.

Anbox - Android in a Box

robbe — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 10:59:18 +0000

> They don't necessarily need to; many Android apps are (or
> can be) compiled to x86.

Based on my anecdotal evidence, this is unfortunately not true for the „long tail“ of special-purpose apps, which I would like to be able to run on the desktop most.

This may well change with the shifting market share of e.g. Atom-based tablets.

Anbox - Android in a Box

muwlgr — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 13:11:18 +0000

I would just propose to give it a year or two, and after that to compare its success to that of Shashlik
Remember, the lifetime of Shashlik was about 9 months : Jul 2015 to Mar 2016

Anbox - Android in a Box

roc — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:26:24 +0000

> how much is this lighter than QEMU

Quite a lot probably. Hosting a fully virtualized kernel is significant overhead, another full OS within the host OS.

> how they are going to run native ARM code on non-ARM CPUs?

They don't necessarily need to; many Android apps are (or can be) compiled to x86.

Anbox - Android in a Box

muwlgr — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 10:06:15 +0000

Interesting to know what makes Shashlik "an emulator" (uses QEMU, that's all?) and why Anbox is different (uses LXC, how much is this lighter than QEMU, and how they are going to run native ARM code on non-ARM CPUs?).
In my view, both of them are emulation/virtualization environments with very similar goals.
And the difference I see is that Shashlik has already been forgotten/abandoned (since about Mar 2016), while Anbox is only going to get to the same state after a year or two.

Anbox - Android in a Box

arne — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 05:14:33 +0000

from anbox.io: "Projects like Shashlik or Genimobile use an emulator [...] The emulator creates an entire emulated system which has its own kernel etc whereas Anbox runs the Android system under the same kernel as the host operating system does."

Anbox - Android in a Box

muwlgr — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:38:54 +0000

Why not just complete the previous effort started at http://shashlik.io/ ?

Anbox - Android in a Box

SEJeff — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 14:17:07 +0000

Stupid question, but why not build this ontop of docker? You could put the kmods in a privileged container.

Anbox - Android in a Box

alexl — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 13:26:11 +0000

We'll never be able to have things like kernel modules in a flatpak, which seems to be needed for Anbox.

Anbox - Android in a Box

morphis — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 09:53:36 +0000

Possible, but I never looked into the details of flatpak yet and if it supports to the containerization we have to do for the Android system. Happy to accept contributions :-)

Anbox - Android in a Box

risimmonsuk — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 08:43:53 +0000

I'm running on Ubuntu, but the documented method on anbox.io for installing doesn't seem to quite work on that either.

I did;

sudo snap install --classic anbox-installer

If you then run sudo anbox-installer it complains and tells you to run as non-root. If you run as non-root it tries to look in the wrong place for the installer (~/snap/anbox-installer instead of /snap/anbox-installer). However you can just run the installer.sh script (as non-root) directly from /snap/anbox-installer/10/installer.sh.

Anbox - Android in a Box

lkundrak — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 05:40:50 +0000

I'm wondering if it would be possile to have an Android runtime for flatpak?

Anbox - Android in a Box

ccchips — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:31:43 +0000

I am very interested in trying this out but I am having trouble getting the pieces in place. Maybe it is because the software is in a very early stage and I am not the greatest at handling Alpha software. The problem I am having is that after I install snapd and then try to install anbox, I get the message that anbox is not installed. Do I need to do everything as root at this point? I am on Linux Mint 18.1. I am sure that if I fiddle around with it long enough I will probably figure this out on my own but I am hoping someone else has some ideas. As a relatively casual user, would I be better off installing virtualbox and Android x86 instead? Please realize that I am not saying anything against this software because it is in an early stage.

Anbox - Android in a Box

juliank — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 19:57:13 +0000

Awesome work!!!