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Comment by fulafel

11 hours ago

Apparently it's about software, not hardware - Qualcomm recommends running Android under a virtual machine (which lacks nested virtualization support).

9 comments

fulafel

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mcbridematt  6 hours ago

IIRC Qualcomm smartphone SoCs have always run some kind of hypervisor, I believe it's to allow partitioning of the CPU cores with the modem/DSP.

They used to (mid-late 2000s) use an L4 derivative ("REX"?), with the more recent chips (including the 'X' series for PCs) using their homegrown "Gunyah" hypervisor (https://github.com/quic/gunyah-hypervisor)

superb_dev  10 hours ago

Is this for real? Do you have any more info on this? It seems crazy to me given how popular their chips are and how many problems I’d imagine this creates

  • user_7832  10 minutes ago

    The other HN comment already has some info, but from what I remember from r/android threads, it's because qualcomm doesn't allow unsecure (sic? unencrypted?) VMs, which, ironically, are needed to run nested Linux.

    Disclaimer, my memory on the exact terminology is extremely fuzzy. But pixels with tensor can run it just fine. And it's purely a software thing too, btw.

  • pierrec  7 hours ago

    It shouldn't be problematic if the processor supports it well. For example modern Windows is always running as a VM and people are barely aware of that.