Android 4.4/5.0 OOB?


Hi, sorry for taking so long to respond, I'm very busy with uni deadlines and work

Sounds like a great idea, though I'm going to need some step-by step instructions and an idea of what conditions show success/failure - and a Prototype. (They don't exist yet.) BUT - this type of thing is exactly what I would like to help test.

Sounds perfect, thanks Grench, hopefully that lets us run the emulator before all units ship. When I hear prototypes start shipping and I'm over this uni workload I'll figure something out with you :)

@pablocrossa, do you have any news pal?

Hi, again sorry for the delay, everything's mostly the same except that I've started dwelving into what's needed to make the Google OpenGL ES 1/2 renderer use the native Pyra OpenGL ES 1/2 libraries, with any shims that might be needed. I also THINK that the updated ranchu fork (as opposed to the ancient Goldfish fork) has gained OpenGL passthrough support, which makes life easier without ugly patches and hacks.
But right now the project's on hold until I have a bit more free time.

Hope to get back to you guys with some more progress soon :)
 
Hi, sorry for taking so long to respond, I'm very busy with uni deadlines and work



Sounds perfect, thanks Grench, hopefully that lets us run the emulator before all units ship. When I hear prototypes start shipping and I'm over this uni workload I'll figure something out with you :)



Hi, again sorry for the delay, everything's mostly the same except that I've started dwelving into what's needed to make the Google OpenGL ES 1/2 renderer use the native Pyra OpenGL ES 1/2 libraries, with any shims that might be needed. I also THINK that the updated ranchu fork (as opposed to the ancient Goldfish fork) has gained OpenGL passthrough support, which makes life easier without ugly patches and hacks.
But right now the project's on hold until I have a bit more free time.

Hope to get back to you guys with some more progress soon :)

By my estimate they're likely more than a month out from Prototypes shipping, so you don't need to get into a big hurry on it.

What country/region are you on? I'm pretty close to the geographic center of the continental United States.

I'm wondering if we would be able to get you direct access to one of the prototypes for a week or two - if not mine then maybe one of the other 7 (so far silent) purchasers.

There is still a lot of wait time though. Good to see you haven't given up on the idea.
 
More than a month just for prototypes? :(

What's your estimate for the production units?
 
Hi, sorry for taking so long to respond, I'm very busy with uni deadlines and work



Sounds perfect, thanks Grench, hopefully that lets us run the emulator before all units ship. When I hear prototypes start shipping and I'm over this uni workload I'll figure something out with you :)



Hi, again sorry for the delay, everything's mostly the same except that I've started dwelving into what's needed to make the Google OpenGL ES 1/2 renderer use the native Pyra OpenGL ES 1/2 libraries, with any shims that might be needed. I also THINK that the updated ranchu fork (as opposed to the ancient Goldfish fork) has gained OpenGL passthrough support, which makes life easier without ugly patches and hacks.
But right now the project's on hold until I have a bit more free time.

Hope to get back to you guys with some more progress soon :)
Hey, could we have the link to the QEMU and Android image you're using? I wanna run it on my PC.
 
Hey, could we have the link to the QEMU and Android image you're using? I wanna run it on my PC.

Right now I'm running the standard emulator (with a semi-broken 3D) and the standard vanilla Android 6.0 image built for it, are you comfortable downloading and compiling everything on Ubuntu or would you like me to upload? The generated images will be designed for an Ubuntu system but might work elsewhere :)
 
Right now I'm running the standard emulator (with a semi-broken 3D) and the standard vanilla Android 6.0 image built for it, are you comfortable downloading and compiling everything on Ubuntu or would you like me to upload? The generated images will be designed for an Ubuntu system but might work elsewhere :)
I use Gentoo, not Ubuntu, but I would assume the same packages are available. I am comfy compiling things, as long as it's standard compilation procedure. I just want to be able to use Marshmallow on my PC, and none of the things I have tried so far work.
 
I use Gentoo, not Ubuntu, but I would assume the same packages are available. I am comfy compiling things, as long as it's standard compilation procedure. I just want to be able to use Marshmallow on my PC, and none of the things I have tried so far work.

If you just want to use Marshmallow consider installing the SDK, downloading an image through it and I'm sure there are steps to add the Google Services to one virtual device you create through it.

If you still want to build from source:
The Android build system is tested only on Ubuntu AFAIK, Gentoo might need some caressing... If you can't build successfully I'd consider a termporary chroot for that.

Before starting select a branch. I picked one of the android-6.0.1_r branches, cannot remember which one but I'm pretty sure all will have support for the emulator, you'll probably be best picking the newest from https://source.android.com/source/build-numbers.html
Then set up the build environment. I've personally set it up in a 14.04 chroot I made with debootstrap following the instructions from https://source.android.com/source/initializing.html

At the bottom of the page you'll find a link to the next step, the same as with the next one. Just follow the instructions and you'll build the emulator and image for the target system (emulator).

Hope that helps
 
Can somebody make a little summary about this topic? I have a friend interested and he asked me about android on pyra.
 
Can somebody make a little summary about this topic? I have a friend interested and he asked me about android on pyra.
At the moment, no it's not possible. However, it is in theory and some people started playing around with the idea.
Correct me, if I'm wrong.
 
Hi there

I had some time to work on this over the weekend and decided to temporarily switch my approach; I'm now making the official Android emulator (based on the ancient Qemu with backports...) build on ARM.

I have a build optimised for a Cortex-A15 with FPU+NEON, using the TCG (read: no CPU acceleration) and the host OpenGL libraries (read: GPU acceleration on desktop GL 2, not GLES devices), and soon I will have backported the ARM KVM support introduced in 1.5.0 from version 1.7.0 (some structures within the emulator code align with 1.7.0, so that's where I'm ripping the code out from), which includes GIC support.

I can't get Android to boot because, with GPU acceleration disabled and after waiting 2mins (the emulator window opens with the right skin etc), I still get a black screen. I suspect it's more due to the fact I'm running TCG on TCG on a 2.4GHz Core2Duo, which means the resulting emulator is probably too slow to get anywhere anytime soon (probably about 1% of the speed of the actual CPU AKA not usable at all). I can connect through Telnet though.

This is a call for testers, so if you:

  • Have a Cortex-A15 device
  • Have support for NEON and FPU
  • Can run an X server on it (even through XVNC or whatever Android users have to do now)
  • Can run an Ubuntu 14.04 system (be it native or chroot)
And preferably have:

  • A KVM-enabled kernel (but testing in TCG mode would still help)
  • Mesa (so we can test the host rendering libs)
Please get back to me so I can send you the binary and Android 5.1 system images + boot script to test nothing is severely broken. Testing on both TCG and KVM mode would be fantastic, with additional testing against Mesa with the host rendering libraries being a huge help too. If KVM works and the host libraries are not broken then the only step missing is to re-write the translator's GLX code to use EGL and possible intercept some problematic OpenGLES calls that cannot be run native (not a GL expert myself really...) and a basic system would be ready to roll :)

Trashy? :)

Thank you all for the help

I have an ODROID-XU4 in which I could test :D
 
@pablocrossa Hey, even if the VM doesn't support 3D, android apps that don't need it will still work right? Like Google Maps, or Words with Friends, or maybe Netflix?
 
As there are at least two projects for running Android apps under Linux (if arch supported which it is); will any of those work?
 
As there are at least two projects for running Android apps under Linux (if arch supported which it is); will any of those work?

Got any links to them? Do they work on any ARM host devices currently? Is source available?

If there is already something out there, @TrashyMG or someone else with a dev board might want to do some testing on it.
 
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