What's New

Android session

The login screen (GDM, SDDM and others) lists an Android session, which
runs only Ika's console under Cage: Android fills the screen with no desktop
around it. Closing the console, or turning Android off from its power menu,
returns to the login screen. Log in automatically with it to start the PC
straight into Android.
ika-base now requires Cage.

Text and icons are no longer drawn as noise with gfxstream: crosvm has KVM
honor the guest's PAT on Intel CPUs, and NVIDIA's driver always gets cached
host memory for uploads.
Venus mode works on NVIDIA's proprietary driver, but stay on gfxstream_guest_angle for now:
- SurfaceFlinger gets its buffers.
- The console is no longer blank.
- Apps that map video memory no longer fault the GPU.
Ika with an nVidia GPU no longer dies at the first redraw after the GPU
suspended while idle.

"GPU Hardware" at the top picks the host GPU Ika uses; Ika then renders on
it alone.
CPU-rendered GPU modes are shown in yellow to alert users.
Dropped yad dependency.
Holding Shift while opening Ika or an app from the app menu, a dock or the
taskbar opens its Startup Options on Linux too, as it already did on
Windows.

Performance and compatibility improvemenmts
3DMark no longer fails to start once the shader cache passes 1 GB.
gfxstream's two recording threads no longer wait for each other on every
draw.
The console takes two fewer trips per frame: gfxstream reads frames straight
into crosvm's framebuffer, and the console hands them to the compositor
without going through OpenGL.
A render pass on one slice of a 3D render target no longer removes the D3D12
device.
The installer no longer warns about the devices' ACL entries.

On Intel hybrid CPUs, the vCPUs run on the P-cores instead of the E-cores,
so the guest's CPU speed no longer halves under Linux. Geekbench CPU on an
RTX 4080 laptop went from 1,174 / 8,377 to 2,300 / 11,205.
ika stop and ika restart have Android write its data to disk first, so
an app installed or a file downloaded in the last minute before them is no
longer gone at the next start.
--gpu_mode=auto on the command line picks the GPU mode the way
gpu_mode = auto in ika.ini does, instead of starting the guest on
SwiftShader.
The console sends Android the keyboard's volume, media, function, lock,
Print Screen, menu, browser and power keys.
Android's files are unmounted from the host when Android turns itself off.
vCPU frequency tables include the host's boost frequencies, so crosvm does
not panic on boot.
ARM64 hosts get a usable vCPU frequency table whatever cpufreq reports.