start-avm

A utility to easily run Android Cuttlefish VMs with QEMU.

Building

Simply running make should do the trick. No special dependencies are required.

cd ~/start-avm
make

Using

Setting up the Cuttlefish Directory

1. Download a cuttlefish image from http://ci.android.com/. If you don't exactly what to download, read this guide.

2. Create a directory and unpack for the cuttlefish images and the CVD tools.

mkdir cuttlefish
cd cuttlefish
unzip ~/Downloads/aosp_cf_x86_64_phone-img*.zip
tar xf ~/Downloads/cvd-host_package.tar.gz

3. Create a directory to hold the QEMU images and support files, and use cvd2img to generate the images.

mkdir qemu
cd qemu
cvd2img ..

Option 1: Starting the VM directly on host

1. Go to the directory containing the start-avm repository.

cd ~/start-avm

2. On a terminal with access to the graphics server, run start_avm.sh pointing to the cuttlefish directory.

./start_avm.sh ~/cuttlefish

Option 2: Starting the VM as a container with podman

1. Go to the directory containing the start-avm repository.

cd ~/start-avm

2. On a terminal with access to the graphics server, run run_podman.sh pointing to the cuttlefish directory.

./run_podman.sh ~/cuttlefish

Using virgl acceleration and multi-touch support

If you're on a device with hardware capable of generating multi-touch events, you can enable both multi-touch support and virgl acceleration (which depends on multi-touch support due to cuttlefish limitations) by passing the -m and -v options to either start_avm.sh or run_podman.sh.

Troubleshooting

Broken config file

If you get messages about syntax errors in .cuttlefish_config.json config file then:

• Remove the file.
• Run start_avm.sh (or run_podman.sh) twice.

Outdated container image

If run_podman.sh doesn't work, it may be because of an outdated container image on Quay. To rebuild the image locally, run:

podman build -t qemu-android .

in start-avm directory.