Run Android app in qemu-arm?

Question

There are very few articles on this topic on the net, so I'm asking here if it makes sense, what I'm doing.

I'm trying to partition virtual disk just the way android does it, mount android images (system, root etc) only to run android app on Linux in qemu-arm.

Have you done it? Is it possible? Will the performance be better than in default Android emulator?

I'm sorry if the question is stupid.

Answer 1

qemu-system-arm actually supports running certain versions of Android.

The following link has worked for me.

https://www.linaro.org/blog/core-dump/running-64bit-android-l-qemu/

In terms of performance, although the default Android emulator is also based on Qemu, it is now equipped with graphic accelerations, which is not supported by the mainstream Qemu.

The Android emulator provides accelerated graphics support in the emulated guest Android operating system, by providing an OpenGL passthrough mechanism that allows the emulated Android system to make OpenGL calls that are directly rendered by the host accelerated graphics stack to the emulated window without having to emulate a GPU inside QEMU itself. [source]

Answer 2

Apparently, upstream qemu-arm doesn't support running Android. see http://www.linaro.org/blog/core-dump/running-64bit-android-l-qemu/ where it talks about porting patches to QEMU for android support. You should probably use the QEMU which comes with android emulator itself, which will most probably result in the same performance!