Custom VM

Headless VMs

If your VM is headless (i.e. console in/out is the primary way of interacting with it), you can spawn it by passing a JSON config file to the VirtualizationService via the vm tool on a rooted AVF-enabled device. If your device is attached over ADB, you can run:

cat > vm_config.json <<EOF
{
  "kernel": "/data/local/tmp/kernel",
  "initrd": "/data/local/tmp/ramdisk",
  "params": "rdinit=/bin/init"
}
EOF
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 "/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.

Terminal app

Run GUI apps

Click Display button above to enable display. And then, go back to the terminal, and run GUI apps.

Mouse passthrough

There is a button for mouse passthrough in a display activity. With that, external mouse event is directly delivered to a VM instance.

Hardware acceleration

If a device supports gfxstream, a user can enable hardware acceleration in Terminal app's settings menu. If you want to test in the userdebug device, create /sdcard/linux/gfxstream file, which enables gfxstream for VM. Note: on HSUM (Headless System User Mode) devices like some tablets and laptops, use the path /mnt/user/10/emulated/10/linux/gfxstream instead.

Connect to console via ADB

Run adb shell vm console which returns the command to attach console of an existing VM instance.

(Experimental) Use other desktop environment

We recommend a user to use weston with kiosk mode for single-app experience. If you want to experiment with other desktop environment, please remove the line including systemctl --user start weston in /usr/local/bin/enable_display and usr/local/bin/enable_gfxstream to avoid conflict with newly installed display manager with existing weston.

Connect to host Android device with ADB

To establish ADB connection from the VM at terminal app to the host Android device, check if adbd of the host Android device is listening to any vsock ports in advance.

There are some properties to make adbd listening to the vsock port. To check whether those properties exist or not, connect your Android device with USB by following instruction at https://developer.android.com/tools/adb#Enabling, and execute adb shell getprop | grep adb on your computer. If execution result contains one or more lines below, continue to the later steps with the first PORT_NUMBER ordered below.

  1. [service.adb.listen_addrs]: [vsock:<PORT_NUMBER>]
  2. [service.adb.tcp.port]: [<PORT_NUMBER>]
  3. [persist.adb.tcp.port]: [<PORT_NUMBER>]

If none of the properties above is set, execute adb tcpip <PORT_NUMBER> on your computer with picking any new PORT_NUMBER, to set the property with that PORT_NUMBER and restart adbd with that property.

Then, execute commands below at terminal app to install adb and establish ADB connection.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install adb
adb connect vsock:2:<PORT_NUMBER> # 2 is CID of the host Android device