Comment by tiku
2 days ago
Any way to get this to run in a VM? Or should I give up and buy a phone that can handle it and use it through remote desktop tools?
2 days ago
Any way to get this to run in a VM? Or should I give up and buy a phone that can handle it and use it through remote desktop tools?
Yes, I run Waydroid (LineageOS in a Linux container) in an Ubuntu x86_64 VM on my home PC using their default installation method, plus libhoudini via https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script to be able to run arm64-only apps, and waypipe the UI to my (Linux) phone that is connected to my home LAN via Wireguard.
I used to run Waydroid directly on the phone, but the phone has terrible specs and Waydroid had become frustrating in the last few months, when it updated its LineageOS image to a new Android version. It would frequently crash or pop up an infinite series of "app is not responding" dialog boxes, even though whatever app it was was responding just fine. With my new VM + waypipe setup, Waydroid launches in ~10s instead of ~3 minutes, and everything is reasonably snappy despite now traveling over the network, so I'm happy.
There is a guide on how to set up LineageOS for libvirt (i.e. QEMU) [1], but there exist no prebuilt images at this point in time.
[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/libvirt-qemu
The requirements are monstrous: 300GB storage, 32GB RAM. My everyday working laptop has a 240GB SSD. I've build the kernel, Firefox, and the heaviest packages which I use from sources with a fraction of those resources.
I can't even fathom what the build system is doing in order to require this amount of storage.
> I can't even fathom what the build system is doing in order to require this amount of storage.
A large number of 17 year old repositories, prebuilt toolchains, and the fact that you otherwise have every little bit of source code, intermediary results, and output to create a full operating system all in the same place.
As for the memory, the very first step (that basically already is the benchmark for the most memory usage) is loading the entire build tree and generating build steps. Yes, that takes 32GB of RAM, if not 64GB nowadays.
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The article to which you're commenting has two whole paragraphs on the newly introduced support for virtualisation and qemu.
Waydroid runs Lineage, so it's certainly possible, but I don't know how easy it is on something like QEMU.
That being said buying a phone compatible with Lineage or Graphene (only Pixels for the latter) is well worth it. This will probably become even more important in the future if Google bans sideloading or complies with idiotic laws such client-side scanning of messages in some markets.