Anbox is container based approach to boot a full Android system.
Anbox uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on any platform.
The container itself does not run as root but as a unprivileged user. It just need to be able to perform a few operations to setup a container like spawning up new namespaces, chroot'ing to a rootfs etc.
Android inside the container has no direct access to any hardware. All hardware access is going through the anbox daemon. We're reusing what Android has implemented for the Qemu based emulator. The Android system inside the container uses different pipes to communicate with the host system and sends all hardware access commands through these. OpenGL rendering is provided through this.
For more details have a look at the following documentation pages:
- Android Hardware OpenGLES emulation design overview (https://goo.gl/O2Yi6x)
- Android Qemu fast pipes (https://goo.gl/jl4GeS)
- The Android "qemud" multiplexing daemon (https://goo.gl/DeYa5J)
- Android Qemud services (https://goo.gl/W8Lx6t)
Anbox reuses code from other projects like the Android Qemu emulator or bubblewrap (https://github.com/projectatomic/bubblewrap). These projects are available in the external/ subdirectory with the licensing terms included.
The anbox source itself (in src/) is licensed under the terms of the GPLv3 license:
Copyright (C) 2016 Simon Fels [email protected]
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranties of MERCHANTABILITY, SATISFACTORY QUALITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.