this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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not really no. I mean, sure you could add a fancy gui on top of it. but 90% of android emulators are some kind of android x86 + libhoudini/ndk + vmm. some modify surfaceflinger so that each application will render to it's own window, but usually it's just disabling launcher, and sending some kind of command to open the app from a gui (IE. sending adb launch commands)
Yes and no.
In general it is true that an emulator just needs to translate instructions, but for things like games and the Android operating system, your emulator also needs to use whatever hardware acceleration you have or it will run like dogshit.
Android makes extensive use of graphical acceleration to the point where it is a mandatory requirement. There is no part of the UI that doesn't use hardware acceleration.
Luckily Android uses OpenGL ES, and there are means to translate that into Vulkan without too much issue.
But what you're talking about is virtualisation for the most part - the only thing arguably doing any actual emulation in your scenario is libhoudini. Otherwise, there isn't any translation of instructions - The Android VM instructions get executed directly on Ring 0 of the CPU
and? vbox, qemu, hyperv and vmware, all have gpu acceleration to a degree. Qemu will also be getting vulkan acceleration soon
EDIT: forgot crosvm (google play games) which does too
And therefore it means that in addition to doing translation work, they themselves need to implement hardware acceleration. That's why you see many game emulators requiring DirectX even if the console in question never used it.
Oh, and 4 of the 5 products you mentioned are not emulators. Of the 5, only QEMU is fully capable of emulation. There is a massive and important difference between virtual machines and emulation.
nearly every single emulator, for Windows is a VM pretty much. Blue stacks, memuplay, WSA, Google Play games.
no, there is no difference between virtualization and emulation. virtualizations just hardware accelerated emulation. That's it. If you use blue stacks and call it emulation, because it's emulation, all the sudden it's not emulation because it's virtualization?
If that is the bar, then there are incredibly few Android emulators. Yes some Android emulators, or rather virtualizers, do implement some custom GPU acceleration stuff. but not all, Google Play games uses CrossVM with vulkan cereal, WSA uses their weird stack. genymotion IIRC uses virgl, so does qemu.
EDIT: by the way, with VirtualBox VMware so and so forth, you are still emulating. you are emulating NICs, oftentimes you are emulating GPU, you are emulating storage controllers, you are emulating PCI controllers, so on and so forth.
Yes there is.
Actually it's the opposite: virtualisation does as little emulation as possible. At a high level, it acts more as a ring-fence around native resources than an actual emulator. With most virtualisation, the only things that are getting emulated are minor components with little computing involved like sound and networking cards.
The reason virtualisation is so fast compared to emulation is because it's running the code as-is and not translating it.
That is correct. You basically have QEMU and that's it.
Not exactly. If you are not doing GPU passthrough, either fixed or mediated, most virtualisation software use API forwarding for 3D acceleration APIs. That is, the hypervisor passes calls to Vulkan, DirectX, etc, from the guest to the host, has the host's GPU render it, then pass it back.
GPU emulation is a very last resort, as the performance is dreadful.
Virtualization is a specialization of emulation. to emulate something merely means to imitate. virtualization is still emulating a secondary PC environment. Saying virtualisation is not emulation is just fudging terms because people don't like the implication that the term "emulation" has. I recommend reading WINE's FAQ where even they admit that it would be more accurate to say "wine is not just an emulator". Virtualization is just a subclass of emulation.
this is a common misconception Most VMMs emulate GPU. virtualbox, vmware, wsa, and qemu all emulate GPU (or rather, technically a gallium driver) for opengl support on linux and even windows. as windows guests under virtualbox actually uses gallium nine/dxvk under the hood (perf is still crap somehow though). the technical breakdown for qemu would be [ host gpu <--> gallium <--> opengl <--> qemu pipe <--> virgl <--> gallium calls <--> opengl <--> application ]
vmware/vbox are slightly different as it's an accelerated backend to vmgfx but that too emulates a gallium backend on linux meaning it's doing ogl -> gallium -> ogl etc.... Hyper-v/wsa is the exact same situation as both. I don't believe that bluestacks and memuplay deviates from this greatly. though it's not something I have looked in depth into.
it wasn't until recently with virglrenderer venus for qemu/crosvm and hyper-v gpu-pv that we have gotten real API forwarding for VMs (technically android's cuttlefish also had it IIRC, but preformance was terrible when I played with it, hyper-v also had something but it was really bad too).
as for other forms of api forwarding, qemu-3dfx is a prime example of real "api forwarding" to an extent, rather it forwards 3dfx and opengl calls to the host. and you can have d3d support via wined3d.
I typically use qemu + bliss on these types of systems fine.