Build vbox vdi

[Jimen Ching]

Hi,

I noticed in platform/bootable/diskinstaller, there's a config.mk file that has targets to build VirtualBox VDI images.  Unfortunately, I can't find any Android.mk that includes this config.mk file.  What command line do I use to generate these VDI files?

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

--jc

[Bruce Beare]

I've not tried this in the master branch recently, but it is supposed
to build as:

lunch vbox_x86-eng
make android_disk_vdi

The target is in: bootable/diskinstaller/config.mk

-Bruce

[Jimen Ching]

Thanks!  That worked.

Now I'm able to boot the generated VDI under VirtualBox.  The mouse and ethernet doesn't seem to work though.  Is that supported?  I didn't see code for it, but I didn't look very hard before, because I wasn't even able to generate the disk.

Thanks again for the help.

--jc

P.S.  I noticed there's an Android-x86 project.  Is the in-tree support for x86 deprecated?

[androidzaurus]

Hi,

I played with android_disk.vdi back in May and it worked fine for me.
I took a memo at the time in Japanese[*1], and want to share with
you here.

How to boot android_disk.vdi

1) Make a new virtual machine in VirtualBox.
System is Linux 2.6 and 512MB memory is recommeded.

2) Mount vdi as primary IDE drive.
Not a SCSI drive which is default of VirtualBox.

3) Boot the virtual machine.
Choose "Startup from /dev/sda" in grub menu.

4) Play with it.
[Back] key is assigned to ESC
[Menu] key is assigned to F1
[End] key is assigned to F4

5) Shutdown.
Press and hold F4 key until shutdown dialog comes up.

But android_disk.vdi doesn't support some important features
such as networking and mouse as documented.

I also played with emulator-x86 yestarday and found more useful.
Try "lunch full_x86-eng" and then run the emulator-x86 up.

Hope this helps you a bit.

[*1] http://d.hatena.ne.jp/androidzaurus/20110509/1304930398

[Beare, Bruce J]

correct. No wifi (although you can get some network connectivity manually), no touch and no mouse.

IMO, you are far better off using the emulator (qemu) with a full_x86 image.

Google has release the updated SDK tools including the IA emulator.

[Jimen Ching]

The ARM emulator is just simply not usable, in terms of performance.  So I'm not sure what you mean by 'far better off'.  I'll have to try the IA emulator and see if it is better performance wise.

--jc

[Jimen Ching]

An update.

I've just upgraded to r12 of the SDK/ADT and it didn't seem to have the IA emulator enabled.  I can't find a way to switch to the x86 version of the emulator.  There's a CPU/ABI listbox, but it is disabled.

--jc

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

You need to except IA emulation to be slower than ARM.

The IA emulator works under similar constraints as the ARM one, since
it's architecturally similar with no virtualization, so there's no
silver bullet there. The additional slowdown comes from the fact that
the software pipeline for graphics rendering in the emulated system
isn't as well optimized for IA as it is for ARM.

JBQ

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