Posted by Sandeep Patil – Principal Software Engineer, and Irene Ang – Product Manager
The Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) will be available on upcoming select Android 14 devices. The AVF, first introduced in Android 13 on Pixel devices, provides new capabilities for platform developers working on privileged applications. With AVF, we are more broadly supporting virtualization to Android. Virtualization is widely used and deployed to isolate workloads and operating systems from each other. It enables efficient scaling of infrastructure, testing environments, legacy software compatibility, creating virtual desktops and much more.
With AVF, virtual machines become a core construct of the Android operating system, similar to the way Android utilizes Linux processes. Developers have the flexibility to choose the level of isolation for a virtual machine:
- One-way isolation: Android (the host) can control and inspect the contents of the VM.
- Two-way isolation (Isolated VM): Android (the host) and the virtual machine (the guest) are completely isolated from each other.
Benefits of AVF Isolation:
- Portability
- Performance
- Extensibility
AVF Usage: AVF provides easy APIs to query the device’s ability to create virtual machines and their supported types, and to set up secure communication channels with these virtual machines from applications and services that create them.
AVF Components: AVF consists of the framework APIs, the hypervisor, and the Virtual Machine Manager.
What’s new in Android 14? Android 14, not only makes AVF available on more devices, it also provides a new toolkit to enable building more with AVF and its components:
- Android System API for AVF
- Hypervisor DevEx toolkit
- Hypervisor Vendor Modules
- System Health Improvements
Source: Android Developers Blog