If you want to avoid turning your 'host' OS into Android, you pretty much need either a virtual machine or another approach to intercepting all the system calls. github.com/google/gvisor uses either a ptrace (quite slow) or KVM (without running another Linux kernel) backend.
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I don't think gVisor is close to the point where it could run Android inside it though. It would need a fair bit more work to reach that point. ChromeOS and Anbox are taking the short cut of just turning the host OS into Android, with Anbox also not doing meaningful isolation.
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That's not what I said. I said that you need the host to have an Android kernel. They use modules to make it into one if it isn't built with Android support included:
github.com/anbox/anbox-mo
The Android container uses the host kernel directly including the Binder module.
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It's how it works on ChromeOS too, but on ChromeOS, I'm quite sure they preserve the usual sandboxing / security model / kernel attack surface reduction that's done primarily via SELinux. Anbox disables Android's SELinux usage, which is how a lot of the security model is done.
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What I'm interested in needs no internal security model because it's single privilege domain (one app). Only isolation from host.
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The internal security model protects the kernel from apps, and hides a lot of information leaked from the kernel to apps. By disabling SELinux, it's substantially breaking down the separation between the kernel and the app, making it less isolated than it would be even normally.
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You can't avoid mounting the stuff that the system and apps depend on to run. You are running a whole Android userspace instance including init, vold and all the privileged base system components inside the container. Security model protects the kernel and base system from apps.
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Anbox has user namespaced root inside the container. It's letting the Android system set up mounts, netfilter and so on. It can do everything that root can do inside a user namespace. It uses nearly all kernel / hardware functionality natively / directly and is just namespaced.
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Yes, we've established Anbox is useless junk just by the kernel modules thing already. That's not how you do it.