Collabora is developing an environment to run Android applications on Linux

android on linux

Collaborate with one of the best known open source consultancies, training and products to companies, recently announced that it is developing a new open source project whose main focus is to allow creating an isolated environment for launching Android applications, providing integration of the application's data interface with graphical shells based on Wayland.

The name of this project is "SPURV"with the help of SPURV, a user can run Android applications on Linux along with the usual graphical applications supplied in Linux distributions.

In order to achieve this, the Android environment runs in an isolated container. In the environment, the standard components of the Android platform are installed, supplied in the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) repositories.

About SPURV

SPURV it's more of a collection of tools that can be used to configure an Android container, install Android apps inside it and then run those apps in full screen on a Wayland Linux desktop on top of the Linux kernel.

To run the container, use systemd-nspawn. For Android apps, full 3D acceleration support is provided and for this to work the Linux desktop must be using the Wayland display server.

SPURV makes use of some components to achieve the interaction of the system with the Android container.

Since SPURV for Android behaves like a simulated Android device and adapts the Android build to our requirements.

There are some functional parts of SPURV:

  • Customize defaults
  • Configure network
  • Enable an audio bridge from Android to PulseAudio.
  • Allows a graphics bridge from Android to Wayland

These components are as follows:

SPURV Audio

This it is used to organize the audio output through the Linux audio stack. The component is implemented in the form of a layer that forwards calls to the Android Audio HAL (Hardware Extraction Layer) to the ALSA subsystem.

SPURV HWComposer

It is intended to integrate Android application windows into a Wayland-based environment. The component convert requests to the HWC API (Hardware Composer) on a call to Wayland.

SPURV HWComposer provides tools to display data on the screen, process screen buffers and combine screen buffers from different applications on a single desktop. The protocol used in the HWC conceptually resembles the Wayland protocol, so the translation does not cause problems.

In addition to translating the API from HWC to Wayland, the SPURV HWComposer component also handles input processing, capturing, on the Wayland side, Android-related input events, such as touchscreen information, and their substitution in Android.

SPURV DHCP

This is a simple implementation of the DHCP protocol, which enables the network connection between the main system and the Android environment.

With this, the Collabora developers argue that this project has positive as well as negative parts:

The way SPURV is implemented means that a full operating system is running in a container, which has both positive and negative implications.

One of the positive effects is greater isolation of Android applications, which means greater security and privacy for potentially untrusted applications.

The disadvantages are related to accessibility and hardware performance. All access to the hardware that Android needs must be passed to the container.

In addition to having to manually configure systemd-nspawn access, there are also performance costs associated with running a container.

Try SPURV?

SPURV is in its infancy, so there is still a lot to polish, but this does not mean that we can carry out some tests and know the potential that this project can offer us.

So that If you are interested in it, you can check its intrusions to make the compilation everything from source (Gitlab).

The link is this.


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