First you will need a device that is capable of running virtual machines. On arm64, this means a device which boots the kernel in EL2 and the kernel was built with KVM enabled.
Here are instructions for select devices:
Virtualization source code and relevant tests are located in packages/modules/Virtualization of the AOSP repository.
These are tests where the test driver runs on the “host” (your computer) and it issues commands to the “target” (the connected device or emulator) over ADB. The tests spawn guest VMs and test different aspects of the architecture.
You can build and run them with:
atest VirtualizationHostTestCases
If you run into problems, inspect the logs produced by atest. Their location is printed at the end. The host_log_*.zip file should contain the output of individual commands as well as VM logs.
CrosVM is a Rust-based Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) originally built for ChromeOS and ported to Android.
It is not installed in regular Android builds (yet!), but it's installed in the VIM3L (yukawa) build, as part of the com.android.virt APEX. builds.
You can spawn your own VMs by running CrosVM directly on a rooted KVM-enabled device. If your device is attached over ADB, you can run:
$ adb root $ adb push <kernel> /data/local/tmp/kernel $ adb push <ramdisk> /data/local/tmp/ramdisk $ adb shell /apex/com.android.virt/bin/crosvm run --initrd /data/local/tmp/ramdisk /data/local/tmp/kernel
You can update CrosVM by updating the com.android.virt APEX where CrosVM is in. If your device already has com.android.virt (e.g. VIM3L),
$ m com.android.virt $ adb install out/target/product/<device_name>/system/apex/com.android.virt.apex $ adb reboot
If it doesn't have the APEX yet, you first need to place it manually to the system partition.
$ adb root $ adb disable-verity $ adb reboot $ adb wait-for-device root $ adb remount $ m com.android.virt $ adb sync $ adb reboot
Once the APEX is in /system/apex, you can use adb install to update it further.