Debian coming to android 16! Quite exciting!

sevenape

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Android-16-will-include-a-Terminal-and-full-Linux-VM-support-with-GPU-acceleration.900394.0.html

Some guys on YouTube already have it up and running…

there’s a chance of running full fat Vcv rack or bitwig on a tablet by the end of the year!

qqq

Very cool stuff. Though the latency of audio of software running inside a linux vm is going to be really rough. Reliability of the audio is also something very up in the air imo

wim

That should be fun. There will be a performance hit as an VM, GPU accelerated or not. But still could be quite useful for running (white hat) hacking tools. 😎

I'll be extremely surprised if it does well with audio apps. VCV maybe. Bigwig, maybe not so much.

hes

@wim said:
That should be fun. There will be a performance hit as an VM, GPU accelerated or not. But still could be quite useful for running (white hat) hacking tools. 😎

I'll be extremely surprised if it does well with audio apps. VCV maybe. Bigwig, maybe not so much.

There really isn't much of a hit in code execution speed with VMs . I think it's just 5% or so. For people who aren't aware, VMs run code natively with no changes. This is completely different than mere software emulation, where one system is translated to run on another system.

There is somewhat more of a hit with I/O (and thus increased latency), where the virtualized OS needs to access the actual hardware, which is still only directly accessible by the host OS. But the virtualization layer that allows this is pretty thin. So there's potential to be interesting.

I'm curious how audio apps have worked generally in Linux VMs running on MacOS and Windows. I'm sure someone has tried. Don't have time to search now, but I'm sure there are reports out there on the web.

EDIT: Okay, maybe potential is not so great. Ubuntu Studio is a Linux distribution that is optimized for audio and video. Here's what it says about running in VMs:

About Virtual Machines

Due to the degraded performance that happens in virtual environments, we do not support the use of Ubuntu Studio inside virtual machines in production environments. For instance, low latency audio is simply not possible, and audio will degrade in a virtual machine environment, and video production will be noticeably slower. Other unpredictable caveats are possible as well.
https://ubuntustudio.org/support

wim

@hes said:

@wim said:
That should be fun. There will be a performance hit as an VM, GPU accelerated or not. But still could be quite useful for running (white hat) hacking tools. 😎

I'll be extremely surprised if it does well with audio apps. VCV maybe. Bigwig, maybe not so much.

There really isn't much of a hit in code execution speed with VMs . I think it's just 5% or so. For people who aren't aware, VMs run code natively with no changes. This is completely different than mere software emulation, where one system is translated to run on another system.

There is somewhat more of a hit with I/O (and thus increased latency), where the virtualized OS needs to access the actual hardware, which is still only directly accessible by the host OS. But the virtualization layer that allows this is pretty thin. So there's potential to be interesting.

Theoretically you may be right, but I've never found that to be the practical case on any VM on any platform.

There is always a noticeable performance hit. Especially for audio. I have never had a usable emulation on any platform for audio production work. Sometimes graphics can be fairly good if there is enough direct hardware and GPU support.

I've tried Windows, Linux, MacOS virtualization environments of many kinds and with many guest operating systems. The best performance has been with mature virtualization software such as VMWare and VirtualBox on Windows systems with Linux or Windows VMs. I don't even try to get a MacOS guest VM running, though it is possible.

I will say that Docker works fabulously for server type workloads in any environment. The performance is outstanding and there's virtually (pun not intended) no noticeable performance hit. But that never involves graphics or audio processing.

I'm curious how audio apps have worked generally in Linux VMs running on MacOS and Windows. I'm sure someone has tried. Don't have time to search now, but I'm sure there are reports out there on the web.

Short answer? Yes, I've tried many. Results have never been worth the effort.

hes

@wim said:
There is always a noticeable performance hit. Especially for audio. I have never had a usable emulation on any platform for audio production work. Sometimes graphics can be fairly good if there is enough direct hardware and GPU support.

Yes, thanks, see my edit in previous post. (Though I would avoid using word 'emulation' when talking about VMs. Software emulation is technical term meaning something entirely different from what's happening in a VM.)

wim

@hes said:
(Though I would avoid using word 'emulation' when talking about VMs. Software emulation is technical term meaning something entirely different from what's happening in a VM.)

I disagree.

(Though after watching the video, the deep virtualization does look more promising than I originally assumed.)