WayDroid: lets package it for postmarketOS

With WayDroid now in a somewhat usable state, it would be good to get it packaged in edge so more people can test it out and report bugs.

Unlike the old anbox, waydroid offers near-native performance, on the OnePlus 6 this means full speed Android, the ability to run games pretty much all the applications you might want. Although the device gets a fair bit warmer than when doing this on downstream Android.

• Adapt install scripts to APKBUILD
• Automate the config file generation as a post-install step
• Decide if it's best to have the large Android images be part of the package or fetched in *-install (part of the package seems best to me).
• Create new Kconfig check for waydroid (mostly just depends on BINDER stuff, as well as CONFIG_PSI and perhaps some things for networking).
• Deal with the dnsmasq dependency which will be needed to initialise networking in WayDroid.
• Come up with a solution for the bidirectional sharing data between the host user and the container without needing root to copy files.
• Find a way to handle non-integer scaling in phosh causing the Android window to not fill the screen. And a way to deal with padding needed to avoid the Android navigation bar being obscured by the Phosh one (anbox.display_height_padding=100 <- this depends on scaling).

With regards to the binder stuff, currently the lxc config files expect ANDROID_BINDER to be a module which gets probed when you first start the container and configured to create the 3 binder interfaces with specific names (prepended with anbox-), is this a good solution?

Erfanoabdi says he'll be replacing the install scripts with some kind of Python tool. Could/should we make use of this?

changed the description

By Caleb Connolly on 2021-07-27T15:21:26

Decide if it's best to have the large Android images be part of the package or fetched in *-install (part of the package seems best to me).

I would keep it inside a (sub)package or something.

By Dylan Van Assche on 2021-07-30T16:23:37

Definitely part of the package, like we do with Anbox currently. You can fetch a pre-built image in the package source and just install that, but at least the end result will be managed by apk.

By Bart Ribbers on 2021-08-01T10:32:27

We're shipping the images as waydroid-image currently. We might move it to pmaports (as there seems to have been complaints on the Alpine side of having Anbox pre-built images in aports in the past), but at least it's in it's own package.

By Bart Ribbers on 2021-09-14T08:00:20

added help wanted type::feature labels

added 1 deleted label

Erfanoabdi says he'll be replacing the install scripts with some kind of Python tool. Could/should we make use of this?

The tool is in development over here: https://github.com/erfanoabdi/waydroid

Maybe we can just package it and not care about the rest? It has commands to fetch the latest images and setup stuffs in a non-distro specific way. Its not completely ready i guess. As per Erfan, the options/usage of the tool would be something like this: https://paste.myself5.de/ubigesorir.lua

Or we can package it plus have some script/service that do some kind of initialisation, configuration, autostart on boot, create applications shortcuts to the application list or stuffs like that. Just to ensure it integrates well from our side.

By Joel Selvaraj on 2021-08-27T01:27:00

@PureTryOut packaged it and enabled CONFIG_PSI in main/linux-postmarketos-*: !2497 (merged)

I've messed around with it on the pinephone a bit. Not really sure how to use it / when e.g. the container is supposed to start automatically, but when it does show up, the performance is great!

Started a wiki page here, please expand and update with more accurate information if you try it out: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Waydroid

By Oliver Smith on 2021-09-14T07:54:09

I've updated the wiki a bit. Note that there is a OpenRC service available for the container, you can add that to the default runlevel if you want it to start at boot. The Waydroid session will also automatically be started on boot through /etc/xdg/autostart, although if you quit the container (rc-service waydroid-container stop) you'll need to manually start the session.

Once both the container and service are running, apps can be launched through waydroid app launch <fully qualified domain name>, for example waydroid app launch com.android.settings.

By Bart Ribbers on 2021-09-19T13:51:32

The command under "Networking" on the wiki doesn't work for me. it gives me this error:

lxc-attach: waydroid: terminal.c: lxc_terminal_create_native: 927 Not a directory - Failed to open terminal multiplexer device

RTNETLINK answers: Network is unreachable

(i've confirmed with ifconfig that the waydroid0 IP is indeed 192.168.250.1)

By Adam Pimentel on 2021-09-16T21:32:48

RTNETLINK answers: Network is unreachable

Disabling nftables service works for me. It might be blocking something Waydroid needs.

By Sughosha on 2021-09-24T07:09:13

Stopping nftables, then entering the command, and then restarting nftables seems to work.

By Adam Pimentel on 2021-12-31T20:01:04

Should it work on the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro? I tried on both with Edge, but it doesn't. Log says:

[15:58:06] Failed to get service waydroidplatform, trying again...

There were other error messages before. I got rid of them by performing addtional steps that I added under installation in the Wiki.

I also asked in the Waydroid Telegram group, and Jon West told me in a message: "I'm going to have to fire up my rpi400 and start digging into the issues myself I think"

I'm willing to help debug, but I don't really know where to start. Maybe install Waydroid master.

By Felix E. Klee on 2022-01-22T18:09:57

It works for me on the latest stable release of postmarketOS, it just takes a while to start up.

By Adam Pimentel on 2022-01-22T18:09:57

-and by a while, I mean like 10-20 minutes. But once it starts, it runs well compared to anbox.

that error message is normal, I think it is just waiting for waydroidplatform to start.

By Adam Pimentel on 2022-01-22T18:14:53

While you were replying, I just created issue 285 for the Waydroid repo, which gives more details.

Now it's 30 minutes since I ran waydroid session start, and when I run waydroid app list, it still replies with: [19:32:43] Failed to get service waydroidplatform, trying again...

Can you detail exactly the steps that you go through when you fire up Waydroid?

By Felix E. Klee on 2022-01-22T18:33:47

I just run waydroid show-full-ui and wait a while (or tap the desktop icon in the phosh menu, which I assume does the same thing). This is on a phosh-pinephone image I built from pmbootstrap. I forget how I installed it, but it was basically like sudo apk add waydroid and sudo rc-update add waydroid-container default and reboot. You're on postmarketOS v21.06?

By Adam Pimentel on 2022-01-22T18:51:33

I also had to do some other stuff to get networking working (unless you build your image without a firewall), but you can do that later

By Adam Pimentel on 2022-01-22T18:55:56

here is what it looks like: https://diode.zone/w/8xkBJwtWStXctTX4JUnmnJ

By Adam Pimentel on 2022-01-22T19:22:03

Thanks a lot for the vidoe! I just let it sit for more than an hour, starting up waydroid show-full-ui. This time there was no waydroidplatform error message, but also nothing happened, although the log looked fine. I then Ctrl-Ced the process, and did it again, for more than 20 minutes. Again nothing happened. Now I rebooted and I'll execute things in a different order.

I'm on postmarketOS EDGE, running on a PinePhone Pro.

By Felix E. Klee on 2022-01-22T22:15:57

As this it still not working, and for better comparison with @adam.pimentel, I tried to install Phosh, but that failed (see issue 1393). On the PinePhone Pro I have no choice other than to use Edge.

By Felix E. Klee on 2022-01-24T16:38:33

Possibly related bug on Arch with SXMO:

https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/issues/270

A comment there says that the bug appears to be related to full system encryption:

https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/issues/270#issuecomment-1008282300

By korakinos on 2022-02-02T11:55:36

I would recommend opening separate issues for each problem you encounter. Otherwise it become troublesome to track properly

...

Le 2 février 2022 12:55:37 GMT+01:00, "korakinos (@korakinos)" gitlab@mg.gitlab.com a écrit :

korakinos commented on a discussion: #1173 (comment 829206434)

Possibly related bug on Arch with SXMO:

https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/issues/270

A comment there says that the bug appears to be related to full system encryption:

https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/issues/270#issuecomment-1008282300

-- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitLab: #1173 (comment 829206434) You're receiving this email because of your account on gitlab.com.

By Antoine Fontaine on 2022-02-02T16:31:17

I agree! Though as this subthread was already here, I thought a link to another, possibly related issue might be helpful to others investigating this. Sorry for the noise.

By korakinos on 2022-02-02T19:46:17

Ah, I was hoping that I'm doing something stupid, and that it's not really a bug, which is why I didn't open another issue, but I may do so later. Anyhow, with the latest postmarketOS + Phosh (instead of SXMO), I at least get the app list, but when I start an app or the full UI, nothing happens other than that I cannot interact anymore with my device. It looks like there's a transparent window in front of everything. When I kill the session, I get back to using my device. Unfortunately, there's nothing interesting in waydroid log. It's like a black box to me.

By Felix E. Klee on 2022-02-03T10:59:41

marked the checklist item Adapt install scripts to APKBUILD as completed

By Newbyte on 2022-04-13T18:28:02

marked the checklist item *Decide if it's best to have the large Android images be part of the package or fetched in -install (part of the package seems best to me). as completed

By Newbyte on 2022-04-13T18:28:11

Waydroid has been packaged for ages, closing.

By Bart Ribbers on 2022-10-13T20:34:09

closed

removed 1 deleted label

added Waydroid label