Para-virtualization of Android on ARM PB11MPCORE Varun Ganesh Prasanna kumar

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Para-virtualization of Android on ARM
PB11MPCOREVarun GaneshPrasanna kumar

• CSC 714

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Goals of the project

• San-boxed environments like Dalvik do not provide
  complete security
• Virtualization can enhance security and other
  obvious advantages like multiple subscriptions
• ARM v6 instruction set Not all sensitive
  instructions are privileged
• ARM 11 series does not have H/W support like
  Vtd -- full virtualization is not possible
• Hence Para-virtualize the Android stack with L4
  as the hypervisor
• The goal was to extend the existing work done in
  this area and boot L4Android over NFS, achieve a
  stable prompt and solve graphics related issues

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Accomplishments

• Compiled L4 re ,Fiasco kernel ,L4Linux and
  L4Android for ARMv6 (PB11 MPCORE) - got a
  bootable image
• Configured the baud rate on the boot monitor as
  well as in fiasco to fix exiting baud rate issues
• Partitioned and used the SD card to boot L4Linux
  with a ramdisk image as rootFS. Achieved a stable
  prompt
• Configure boot loader and a tftp server to
  download the kernel image over tftp and boot the
  board
• Identified the vbus configuration to create a
  virtual bus so that L4Linux can detect the NIC
  card.
• Configured a static IP and gateway and the kernel
  sends a MNT request to mount the rootFS over NFS
• Repeated the same for L4Android and reached the
  same state
• Built the Android rootFS that can be mounted by
  the kernel

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Current position and future work

• Init.rc fails with errors which need to fixed to
  achieve a stable prompt
• Instead of assigning a static IP. L4Android
  should be configured to send a DHCP request to
  obtain IP address, default gateway and other
  details. DHCP server should be configured to
  achieve the same
• Once the init issues are solved, the graphics
  related issues should be identified and resolved.
  We suspect it could some modules in L4re such as
  mag and fbdrv that need to looked at.