Waydroid

Waydroid is a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system.

Related articles

Prerequisites

CPU Requirements

The requirements depend on the CPU architecture. You can check table for more information.

You can check if you have the required CPU instructions with cat /proc/cpuinfo.

GPU Requirements

Waydroid currently works best with Intel GPUs. They should work out of the box.

AMD GPUs appear to have mixed results (in particular, the RX 6800 does not work using official images as of 2022-09-29); if Waydroid does not work you might also want to try to build a new Waydroid image (which works for Radeon 680M), or try the NVIDIA instructions below.

NVIDIA GPUs do not work currently, but there are 2 workarounds:

  • Switch to integrated graphic card if possible;
  • Use software rendering:
    • Make sure that you have already run waydroid init (see #Installation section)
    • Edit /var/lib/waydroid/waydroid_base.prop and set:
      ro.hardware.gralloc=default
ro.hardware.egl=swiftshader
    • Restart the waydroid-container.service.

Wayland session manager

Waydroid only works in a Wayland session manager, so make sure you are in a Wayland session.

Note that even if you are in X11, many Wayland session managers support nested session (so you can run it inside your X11 session), the simplest example is weston.

Kernel Modules

You need to run a kernel which comes with the binder modules and optionally the ashmem one. They are not part of Arch Linux's default kernel (), thus you need to install a kernel which ships these modules.

You might also need to configure your bootloader to use a different kernel. Please refer to the wiki page of your bootloader how to boot with the new kernel. Booting into another kernel (version) is one of the few occasions when you have to reboot a Linux system. You should boot into the kernel with these modules before starting Waydroid.

To get a compatible kernel, you have multiple options:

Using Linux-Zen

The kernel includes the necessary modules. This might be the most comfortable way, as you do not have to compile the kernel (which takes a long time) and will receive updated versions regularly.

DKMS modules

You can install and load kernel modules with: 

# modprobe ashmem_linux
# modprobe binder_linux

Alternatively, if your kernel is 5.18 or newer, install binder_linux-dkmsAUR, which provides just binder_linux.

Building a kernel

Alternatively, you can recompile the kernel — or other kernel packages (>=5.7) — with the necessary options. Also see Kernel#Compilation.

When setting compilation options, you have 2 options available; binder and binderfs. Instructions for both are provided below.

Using binder

The modules can either be compiled into the kernel (), into modules (), or not at all (). Also, not all combinations in the configuration are possible, and some options will require other options.

The configuration options below will compile binder as a module, while the last option specifies that there will be three devices created in the directory, when the binder module is loaded.

When building a kernel from the AUR, one can update the configuration with the following steps:

  1. run , which will download the sources, verify and extract them and run the function.
  2. edit the file (with the dot in the filename), which is located at the base of the kernel directory.
  3. at the end of the function was probably a command which regenerates the makefiles with information from the configuration, possibly make olddefconfig. Move that to the function, or execute it yourself.
  4. run makepkg --noextract, which will continue from the place where stopped.
Using binderfs

The binder kernel module is known to cause some issues to several users. To address these issues, binderfs was created. One has to choose between the old and the new way when compiling the kernel. With the options below, one will use binderfs instead.

With the kernel sources comes also a simple script to set configuration options. It will not do dependency checks, just like when editing the configuration by hand. When being in the same directory where the file lies, one can execute the following commands:

When building a kernel from the AUR, it is enough to insert these lines at the right place in the PKGBUILD, usually in .

Setup binder devices

Make sure you have the latest version of Waydroid package, and Waydroid will take automatically care of this.

Installation

Install the package.

Optionally, install or to provide the needed Android image through AUR. It is however recommended to let Waydroid itself handle downloading the images.

Afterwards init Waydroid, this will automatically download the latest Android image if it is not yet available.

# waydroid init

To init with GApps support:

# waydroid init -s GAPPS -f

Next start/enable the waydroid-container.service.

Waydroid should now work.

Usage

Make sure that waydroid-container.service is running then run:

$ waydroid session start

The Waydroid session is now active, here are a couple of useful commands to interact with it:

Launch GUI:

$ waydroid show-full-ui

Launch shell:

# waydroid shell

Install an application:

$ waydroid app install $path_to_apk

Run an application:

$ waydroid app launch $package-name #Can be retrieved with `waydroid app list`

Network

The network should work out of the box, if its not you might need to make sure packet forwarding is enabled in kernel and allow the following rules through your firewall before running Waydroid session start.

Taking as an example:

  • Dns traffic needs to be allowed:
  • Packet forwarding needs to be allowed: 
    • # ufw default allow FORWARD

For , you can use those commands:

  • DNS:
  • Packet forwarding: 
    • # firewall-cmd --zone=trusted --add-forward

Troubleshooting

If you run into issues, take a look at the official Issue Tracker: Waydroid issue tracker

General tips

Waydroid is in rapid developement so if you face issues, here is a good list of steps to do first:

  1. Make sure your Waydroid package is up to date;
  2. Make sure you have the latest Waydroid image by running
  3. Reset Waydroid: stop the waydroid-container.service, run and start the service again.
  4. You may also want to do little cleanup, run

Rotated apps are unusable

See https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid/issues/70

Click F11 to switch the current app to windowed mode.

Failed to start Clipboard manager service

Install

Sometimes the physical keyboard does not work

Press Left Alt key.

Commands inside Waydroid shell outputs inaccessible or not found

On Arch based distributions there's a "bug" that may appear while working with lxc-attach that may cause this issue with commands inside waydroid shell like or . A possible workaround for this would be replace the command with

WARNING: Service manager /dev/binder has died

See https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid/issues/136

You should enable PSI. Add to the kernel command line.

gollark: Yes, this does seem to go against the previously established thing of only Ennesby being able to do that.
gollark: It's Australia. It's probably an actual kraken.
gollark: It *would* reduce the habitat available to the many, many very horrible animals there.
gollark: What, the whole island?
gollark: When I downloaded it it extracted to a few gigabytes, not petabytes.

See also
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