How to create a hybrid android and Linux system?

[damienhuang]

Hi,

I need to create a hybrid system that have both android and linux for my imx6-sabrelite board. Can someone help to give me some directions or reference URL to start with?

Thanks

Damien

[gary_bisson]

Hi Damien,

Do you mean that you want both Linux and Android running at the time? If so, I hope you realize this is a complex thing to achieve since the Cortex-A9 doesn't support hardware virtualization. You can have a look at some existing implementation but I'm not sure of the performances:

Open Virtualization - ARM TrustZone and ARM Hypervisor Open Source Software

Otherwise you could make some "peripheral partitioning", leaving 1 or 2 cores to 1 specific OS and the rest to another, making sure only one of them uses a specific peripheral. This approach isn't secure at all though.

Finally, you could have a look at Cellrox device namespace approach which could allow running different OSs on top of the same kernel:

DeviceNamespace · Cellrox/devns-patches Wiki · GitHub

http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/linuxcon-2013_0.pdf 

Regards,

Gary

[damienhuang]

Thanks Gary.

If running two concurrent OS is difficult, can I run one OS, Android/Linux, but supporting two different types of application?

My problem is that I have two types of application, some of them were supposed to run with Android while others were supposed to run with Linux, for sample, some of the applications need glibc, while others need android support.

Some people mentioned to me with chroot, but I am wondering what the best choice is? And is there any readings I can start with?

Cheers,

Damien

[gary_bisson]

Hi Damien,

Even without chroot you could have both bionic and glibc co-existing on the same system. Karim Yaghmour has done it some time ago:

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/pdf/lf_abs12_yaghmour_heritage.pdf

Google Groups

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Gary