Android on RiscV Part - II

The Problem statement:

Our customer expressed their desire to know if Android (AOSP) was already ported by community to the RiscV platform and if we could provide a detailed summary of the current status of AOSP compilation/build and Qemu emulation progress for RiscV

What have we accomplished in Part - I:

1. We launched a Bare Metal instance on AWS

2. Downloaded the AOSP source code

3. Configured and built the binaries for AOSP RiscV

What we plan to accomplish in Part - II:

1. Install Cuttlefish Emulator

2. Launch the emulator

3. Setup reverse tunnel from remote terminal to Bare Metal instance

4. Connect RealVNC and view the Android display

*Before trying to launch the emulator, install the cuttlefish package as below. After installing, reboot the Bare metal machine.

Follow below steps to install cuttlefish:

# Install cuttlefish dependencies:

$> sudo apt-get install -y libgtest-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev libgoogle-glog-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libcurl4 libjsoncpp-dev libgflags-dev cmake libfmt-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler meson bison build-essential

$> sudo apt install -y git devscripts config-package-dev debhelper-compat golang curl

$> git clone https://github.com/google/android-cuttlefish

$> cd android-cuttlefish

$> for dir in base frontend; do \

cd $dir \

debuild -i -us -uc -b -d \

cd .. \

done \

$> sudo dpkg -i ./cuttlefish-base_*_*64.deb || sudo apt-get install -f

$> sudo dpkg -i ./cuttlefish-user_*_*64.deb || sudo apt-get install -f

$> sudo usermod -aG kvm,cvdnetwork,render $USER

$> sudo reboot

# Run command to launch the Cuttlefish emulator

$> launch_cvd -cpus=8 -memory_mb=8192

*The emulator launch takes considerable time to complete. Please wait until you can see the message “VIRTUAL DEVICE BOOT COMPLETED” before proceeding ahead to create a remote connection to the Baremetal instance. Please check the snapshot below.

Figure 1: Successful launch of Android RiscV on Cuttlefish Emulator

*To view the Android Display, connect to the bare metal machine from the laptop (remote terminal). Type the below command on console window of the laptop (remote terminal). The below has been done inside WSL on Windows.

# Set up a reverse tunnel from remote terminal (Laptop) to Bare Metal instance:

$> ssh -i ~/.ssh/mykey.pem -p 22 -L5901:localhost:6444 ubuntu@3.93.48.57 -Nf

Note: You can replace the IP Address above “3.93.48.57” with your Bare Metal IP address!

# Open RealVNC Viewer

⦁ Open the RealVNC viewer on the remote terminal (Local machine / Laptop).

⦁ Click to create a new connection

⦁ Give a name to the connection “AndroidRiscV” or as per your need.

⦁ Set the IP Address as “localhost:5901”

⦁ Click OK and exit the “New Connection” dialog

⦁ Double click on the connection icon to open the VNC display

Figure 2: Android Display Snapshots taken from Remote terminal (Laptop)

Note: Wait for the Display to update. It takes considerable time.

This brings us to the end of Part - II. Hope you enjoyed it and got some insights into the Android AOSP project.