I wonder, if one got a relatively high-powered Android phone, if one could run a conventional Linux distro in a persistent VM and ssh and VNC to it and stuff. Like Crouton for Android or something
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Pixel 6 has usable hardware virtualization support, although you would need an OS making use of it for this.
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Thanks. Someone else mentioned chroot jails-- are there out-of-box solutions for just running a little linux environment / wifi sshd on a stock Android kernel?
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Does Termux count? Although it is getting less OOTB with the forthcoming removal from the Play store :(
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They could have kept it on the Play Store if they moved to distributing packages as apps. It's against Play Store policy for apps to download and run code from other sources themselves, and there are security features for recent API levels phasing out native code exec from data.
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How do web browsers deal with the restrictions? Does JavaScript not count, just native code?
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There's an exception for meaningfully sandboxed code. It permits web browsers. It doesn't permit a web browser with a deliberate way to give the dynamically downloaded JavaScript code execution as the app itself.
In the future the policy may specifically require isolatedProcess.
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There's a distinction between the Play Store policy which says code must come from the Play Store and the OS app sandbox which is very slowing phasing out the ability to execute native code from app data and memory (inside isolatedProcess, in-memory will still be allowed though).
They somewhat blocked themselves from moving ahead with the in-memory changes through ART starting to use a mix of interpreter, JIT and AOT compilation instead of being 99% based on AOT compilation with only static initializers and dynamically loaded code using interpreter.
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They could still come up with an implementation of only allowing the ART JIT especially if they moved it out-of-process. It's not a fancy tracing JIT with patching/deoptimizations, etc. It's compiling a statically typed language and is just a stopgap before the AOT compilation.
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