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. Unfortunately at the moment, we don't have an arm64 device in AOSP which does that. Instead, use cuttlefish which provides the same functionalities except that the virtual machines are not protected from the host (i.e. Android). This however should be enough for functional testing.
We support the following device:
Building Cuttlefish
source build/envsetup.sh lunch aosp_cf_x86_64_phone-userdebug m
Run Cuttlefish locally by
acloud create --local-instance --local-image
If the device is running Android 13 or earlier, join the Android Beta Program to upgrade to Android 14 Beta.
Once upgraded to Android 14, and if you are using Pixel 6 or 6 Pro, execute the following command to enable pKVM. You don't need to do this for Pixel 7 and 7 Pro.
adb reboot bootloader
fastboot flashing unlock
fastboot oem pkvm enable
fastboot reboot
The instruction is here.
There are various tests that spawn guest VMs and check different aspects of the architecture. They all can run via atest.
atest MicrodroidHostTestCases atest MicrodroidTestApp
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.
You can spawn your own VMs by passing a JSON config file to the VirtualizationService via the vm tool on a rooted KVM-enabled device. If your device is attached over ADB, you can run:
cat > vm_config.json { "kernel": "/data/local/tmp/kernel", "initrd": "/data/local/tmp/ramdisk", "params": "rdinit=/bin/init" } adb root adb push <kernel> /data/local/tmp/kernel adb push <ramdisk> /data/local/tmp/ramdisk adb push vm_config.json /data/local/tmp/vm_config.json adb shell "start virtualizationservice" adb shell "/apex/com.android.virt/bin/vm run /data/local/tmp/vm_config.json"
The vm command also has other subcommands for debugging; run /apex/com.android.virt/bin/vm help for details.
Set system property hypervisor.pvmfw.path to custom pvmfw on the device before using vm tool. virtualizationservice will pass the specified pvmfw to crosvm for protected VMs.
adb push pvmfw.img /data/local/tmp/pvmfw.img adb root # required for setprop adb shell setprop hypervisor.pvmfw.path /data/local/tmp/pvmfw.img
Microdroid is a lightweight version of Android that is intended to run on pVM. You can run a Microdroid with empty payload using the following command:
adb shell /apex/com.android.virt/bin/vm run-microdroid
which spawns a “debuggable” VM by default to allow access to guest kernel logs. To run a production non-debuggable VM, pass --debug none.
You can update CrosVM and the VirtualizationService by updating the com.android.virt APEX instead of rebuilding the entire image.
banchan com.android.virt aosp_arm64 // or aosp_x86_64 if the device is cuttlefish UNBUNDLED_BUILD_SDKS_FROM_SOURCE=true m apps_only dist adb install out/dist/com.android.virt.apex adb reboot
The instruction is here.