We have a number of potential board customers who have existing Android applications and are resistant to moving to a Linux platform because of this.
We’ve been bouncing around ideas on how we might support these customers and have been wondering about containerised Android support for a while.
A colleague just put me onto Waydroid which looks neat. Containers and ARM support.
Has anybody had a look at Balena + Waydroid?
Cheers!
Alex
Hello Alex,
I work on the OS team here at Balena. I haven’t tried Waydroid myself, though I have deployed and used QEMU containerized on balenaOS extensively. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use a containerization solution like Waydroid to run Android on top of balena-engine. However, I’m not aware of any previous efforts to make this work.
My main concern would be hardware accelerated graphics when using emulation, but LXC should allow for passthrough of the GPU device node just the same as docker/balena. It seems support for Nvidia GPUs is sparse (probably because the userspace libraries require glibc, which Android doesn’t support), but you should be okay with any GPU that uses mesa, including Intel/AMD.
Overall, it seems like a workable solution, and I’m curious to see how it pans out. If you decide to pursue this approach, keep up updated.
Thanks @jakogut - will keep you updated as we investigate!
It would be valuable to look for user experiences, tutorials, and discussions related to the integration of Balena and Waydroid. Check forums, communities, or social media where users might share their insights and experiences.
One of the guys here is trying to get Waydroid running on an i.MX8MM EVK under Nix. I’ll ask him how he’s doing.
We got a bit sidetracked as we thought there was existing support via some of the other boards for i.MX8MM EVK but the images don’t boot and it was on this platform we wanted to try Waydroid.
We did chat about this @mpous but those Nitrogen etc. images you mentioned don’t seem to come up