It's amazing to run this on a not-rooted smartphone.

It's "amazing" that this is amazing.

iSH/a-shell are equally amazing and "amazing" Linux shells on iPad.

You can just use a local image too though, what is the news here?

So basically termux-usb let's you access USB devices. I love hacks like this, but I don't see using this for anything real. QEMU is heavy. Would it be possible to modify proot to expose the usb device as a device node and build a termux plugin around it? Then we could have chroot like functionality on a full device without QEMU.

Wouldn’t qemu be a bit faster if it was qemu-system-aarch64?

Probably yes. Though i don't understand why not just root your device and install proper linux on it.

As time goes on, rooting is becoming more annoying.

Even if your phone supports it (unlocked bootloader and all that), many applications (financial in particular) block rooted devices. There are workarounds, like with Magisk, but it is a cat and mouse game, and you never know how long things will continue to work. The worst part is that more and more often, you need these apps, as banks may restrict the kind of operations you can do if you don't have an app installed, or for two-factor authentication.

So if you want to play with a rooted device, chances is that you will need two phones. A daily driver for banking and stuff, and one for playing with. But if you are to go with a second device, you may prefer an other kind of device, maybe a small laptop, or a Steam Deck.

Because you want to use Android pay, or one of the various other apps that simply will not run if your device is rooted.

> just root your device

I was curious about the impact in this day and age.

It seeems it would mainly be:

- manage OS updates yourself, by reflashing every time you want something new (some will see this as positive, other not, your choice)

- resign the android images every time you update, as some apps (banking etc.) will bail otherwise.

That sounds like significantly more continuous work than running the Alpine image in an emulator.

Locked bootloaders.

I'm surprised by the performance. Doesn't qemu have dynamic recompilation capabilities?

This shows how far smartphone hardware is from pals who love to tinker with software.

by design.

after sun et al, your employee don't have to be your employee to hold the means of production. pcs are cheap. why everyone liked the cloud at first. and why like ai now.

What is with the defeatism? It all starts somewhere. I moved on from desktop computers 10+ years ago. I've only owned laptops, and I've stayed on laptops because I cannot do "everything" to a reasonable practicality on smartphones. This is one of those pieces I need.

It's not fast today, but it's possible and portable.

> If you have a smartphone and don't have a raspberry pi or other SBC and have some use for an under powered Linux box then have fun.

The situation I imagine for this is that a big solar flare comes and takes down the internet for the foreseeable future. There's all kinds of things that are going to stop working because they want to phone home, but cant. Many of them will just be trash at that point, but some can be hacked to respect some other server on the local LAN--that server might be a repurposed phone.

These might be important things. Farm equipment, thermostats, vehicles... The more control we can have over hardware that'll be easy to find, the better.

It is also good to remember that everything started off inefficient with virtualization, it was incredibly slow and broke lots of things, but now it runs the modern web. I can run a VM on consumer grade hardware and reach most of the way to performance parity with native hardware with no technical skill past installing a few packages and running a wizard. Given the number if ARM based systems on the market now with built in battery and wireless I can imagine a lot of people wanting to repurposed then into home servers with power redundancy and remote access. The future looks bright for ARM servers

with pcs you had so little variation compared to smartphones. some 5 cpus. ram was dumb. disk had a very predictable api but was the worst. serial etc was just dumb pipes and interrupts. then there was some dozen video and network cards. those two took longer to get drivers.

with smartphones you have, i can't even ballpark a number... half chips are SoC in disguise which hardware changes every week then on top of that there's a custom firmware backed for each customer. multiply that for each little piece of the device.

there's a reason Android alternatives are stuck on last released kernel version: they just copy paste the binary drivers

If it's about repurposing phones, then just root the phone. On Android, that's generally not restricted. The benefit of not rooting is that device attestation (used in banking apps and other sensitive things) still works. If you don't care about attestation, root away.

We are going to nuke ourselves before that.

It could start next month for all we know.

> If you have a smartphone and don't have a raspberry pi or other SBC and have some use for an under powered Linux box then have fun.

thing is, smartphones are the most popular sbc on the planet

Complain to the companies that cripple good hardware, not the hackers that tirelessly re-enable it.

I think this stuff (Termux, Winlator, etc.) is a lot more developed and popular than you think. There's GPU acceleration through VirGL so some older games seem to work alright.

I've used Termux to run utilities like ffmpeg and imagemagick on the go. I think one of the limitations for graphical usage might be the limited memory space that it's sharing with Android. It's intriguing that this usbredirect setup allows swap space allocation without root.