Aliendalvik demo on Linux ARM
Here on the blog we have shared information about Sailfish OS (which hasn't had much activity for a few months now) and on this occasion information has been released about a reverse engineering job that has been achieved in Aliendalvik (AppSupport). Jonas Dressler from the GNOME project was the one who shared part of the achievements that has been carried out in the Aliendalvik work.
what makes interesting to the work done by Jonas Dressler in Aliendalvik, this is the owner, that is, closed source, so it is only offered as binary, not source code, and is only sent as part of the images of your officially supported phones.
For those unaware of Aliendalvik, you should know that this is what Waydroid is for Linuxwell basically is a layer for the Sailfish mobile platform which allows you to run applications written for Android. Aliendalvik runs a modified Android system inside an LXC container, sharing the kernel with the host system.
The Sailfish system environment is based on the Mer project (since April 2019 it has been developed as an integral part of Sailfish) and the Mer Nemo distribution packages. The environment uses systemd, DBus, RPM, PackageKit, PulseAudio, BlueZ, Wayland and Qt. The lipstick composite server is built on top of QtCompositor. Firejail is used to isolate applications and ConnMan is used to manage network connections and oFono is used as a phone stack.
About Aliendalvik
Compared with Waydroid, Aliendalvik has much better integration with the host. Display Android apps as individual Wayland windows, forward notifications and MPRIS from Android, Sync host contacts with Android, use the native on-screen keyboard, and much more.
The Aliendalvik environment runs using container isolation tools and the components for integration with the host system are built for the ARM64 architecture and written using Qt.
In the article that presents the improvements that have been achieved in Aliendalvik by reverse engineering it to be able to run it on ARM Linux distributions, the implementation of Aliendalvik has been successfully demonstrated on the Pinephone Pro and OnePlus 6 smartphones, which had the Arch Linux distribution installed along with the GNOME Mobile shell.
It is mentioned that the Android container can be started using standard Linux container tools and host integration binaries They are compiled for ARM64 and mostly link to various open source Qt libraries.
In addition to this, he shares:
But in my opinion, Aliendalvik's true potential would be in making it part of the open source community. Availability to the broader Linux community would mean that we could work together and help fix bugs, implement new features, and cooperate on the underlying stack to better meet the needs of Aliendalvik. And while Waydroid as a current FLOSS solution is already great, getting to the point Aliendalvik is currently at will take a lot of time and effort. It's a shame we have to redo that work when a great solution already exists.
Jonas Dressler points out in his article that, the standard Freedesktop APIs are used to interact with Aliendalvik with the Sailfish user environment; for example, notifications are transmitted via the org.freedesktop.Notification DBus interface and the MPRIS protocol is used to control music players. Each running Android app is displayed using a separate Wayland surface in its own window, and Wayland's "text input" protocol was used to organize the input.
During reverse engineering of Aliendalvik, patches were prepared for the Mutter composite server, scripts and hooks for the sound server and input system needed to run Aliendalvik outside of the Sailfish platform environment.
But in my opinion, Aliendalvik's true potential would be in making it part of the open source community. Availability to the broader Linux community would mean we could work together and help fix bugs, implement new features, and cooperate on the underlying stack to better meet the needs of Aliendalvik.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.