Let's get Android running next to Wayland on an i.MX6 based Nitrogen6_MAX board.

A previous post introduced the SPURV Android compatibility layer for Wayland based Linux environment.

In this post, we're going to dig into how you can run an Android application on the very common i.MX6 based Nitrogen6_MAX board from Boundary Devices.

Install dependencies

sudo apt install \
    apt-transport-https \
    bmap-tools \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    git \
    gnupg2 \
    repo \
    software-properties-common \
    u-boot-tools \
    qemu-kvm

Set up Docker container for building

Docker is needed for generating the Debian root filesystem later on.

# Install Docker
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker-ce

# Set up privileges for Docker
sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}
su - ${USER}

# Fetch Docker image
docker pull godebos/debos:latest

Build Android

For building Android we've chosen to target version  9.0.0_r10, but this is mostly in order to ensure that these instructions remain correct going forward. This work should all be viable for later versions of Android too.

mkdir android; cd android
repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b android-9.0.0_r10
git clone https://gitlab.collabora.com/spurv/android_manifest.git .repo/local_manifests/
repo sync -j15
. build/envsetup.sh
lunch spurv-eng
make -j12
cd ..

Build Linux Kernel

We're using a kernel branch which is very close to upstream modulo one or two patches. The kernel we're going to build will be targeting i.MX 6 & 7 series SOCs.

git clone https://gitlab.collabora.com/spurv/linux.git -b android-container_v5.1-rc5
cd linux
sh ../android/device/freedesktop/spurv/build-kernel.sh
cd ..

Create & flash root filesystem

Just a kernel does not make an OS, so we're using Debian as a base. The way we're going to create the root filesystem is using debos, which is a tool for creating Debian based OS images. You can learn more about it here.

Now we're ready to integrate all of the above into one coherent image. This is where the Nitrogen6_MAX devboard targeting comes in.

git clone https://gitlab.collabora.com/spurv/debos.git
sudo debos/build_image.sh -b /dev/mmcblk0

The platform specific parts are contained in uboot_nitrogen6qp-max.scr and build_image.sh.

Boot!

Pop the flashed SD-card into your device and restart it, and then log in as root/root.

In order to start Android, run one of these two commands:

# Launch Weston and an Android application
/home/aosp/run.sh

Starting the Android application might take a minute or two, but Weston should start immediately.

Acknowledgments

A lot of different contributors enabled this work, both directly and indirectly.

• Boundary Devices
• Pengutronix
• Zodiac

Visit Robert's blog.