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Android guest addition

Posted: 10. Jun 2011, 19:48
by jorgensen
Doing android development is a big challenge, and especially the emulator is a paint in the ...

An alternative is to use Android x86 running as a VirtualBox guest and this works very well except the mouse has to be captured and release by the host key.

It would be great if VirtualBox could support android x86 on a limited level, where the mouse integration has first priority.

To whom that has no knowledge to all this, the Linux OS for android-x86 has been compiled to x86 code whereas the Google emulator uses a translator from ARM to x86 code. In fact you program in Java, which is compiled to ARM code, which is then translated to x86 code - really frustrating!

Link to android x86: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 10. Jun 2011, 21:18
by Sasquatch
Android is not a supported Guest OS, so there are no GA. Also, it doesn't meet the requirements for guest addition support: you can't install support packages for the kernel to make kernel modules. At least not that I am aware of.

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 26. Aug 2013, 11:46
by aitor400
I want the Guest Additions to have shared folders

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 26. Aug 2013, 14:21
by mpack
That would require Android itself to support Samba. Does it? Providing the infrastructure for shared folders is useless if the guest OS has no concept of it.

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 28. Aug 2013, 11:52
by klaus
Please don't throw VirtualBox shared folders and Samba into one bucket. They are totally independent concepts and implementations. For shared folder support in the additions there is no network connectivity needed, and also it isn't based on SMB/CIFS protocols.

Shared folders in the Linux case is a standalone filesystem implementation which talks to the guest additions driver to get its requests handled by the host part of VirtualBox.

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 28. Aug 2013, 13:02
by mpack
Ah, of course. I knew that, my brain must have glitched - conflating true shared folders with GA shared folders. Not enough caffeine, or too much - I can never tell.

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 19. Oct 2016, 01:37
by aaronfranke
I would like to revive this topic because I think that Android guest additions would be a great feature to Virtualbox and I'd love for Oracle to take a look into it.

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 19. Oct 2016, 09:32
by mpack
I don't speak for the devs, but I'd say that the chance of this happening today (2016) is far less than it was in 2011. Even the teeny market which existed for Android x86 in 2011 has AFAIK all but disappeared. Nothing is going to budge Windows on Intel based devices (not counting Apple, which is a separate ecosystem, and note that there are no GAs for OS X either).

As alluded to above, if shared folder is your goal then setting up a true network share is easy enough for any worthwhile guest OS. Even DOS guests can do it. You should ask on an Android forum how they would do it.

Re: Android guest addition

Posted: 27. Oct 2016, 22:28
by VagrantBox
I would just like to add that the android x86 project is practically dead. Took them like 8 months to get the Lollipop iso out.

Just use the Android AVD's with HAXM or KVM acceleration. I can tell you right now that an Android AVD w/ HAXM acceleration running on any decent Intel chip w/ host gpu acceleration is FAST. It will also be more true to life experience than the x86 project's image (granted, they're both x86 instruction sets at the end of the day).

Also, the peripheral usage on these our seamless, and intel android images are out day 1 side by side with google's images.