A crafty developer managed to run Windows 11 Arm on Android 13 in a virtual machine on a Pixel 6 smartphone. it’s far from a perfect experience, but it seems to be working well. One of the most important new features of Android 13 is the support for KVMs (Kernel-based Virtual Machines), which allows installing any operating system compatible with the 64-bit ARM architecture with near-native performance.
It all worked because Android 13 on the Pixel 6 supports the new virtualization framework, as explained in detail by XDA-Developers. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when more people use Android 13, as the new virtualization framework could lead to some very interesting developments
User @kdrag0n played around with this feature and managed to install several Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 21.10, Arch Linux ARM, Void Linux, and Alpine Linux without any problems. He then went further and decided to install the ARM version of Windows 11, with very good results:
Full-blown virtual machines with the KVM hypervisor (near-native performance) on Pixel 6 + Android 13 DP1 pic.twitter.com/4tgtJTPRyO
— Danny Lin (@kdrag0n) February 13, 2022
According to the user, he was able to run several applications without any problems, and CPU, RAM, and memory performance are very close to native performance. Unfortunately, graphics acceleration is not supported since there are no drivers for the custom Google Tensor SOC used in the Pixel 6, but the experience still seems good.
One thing we couldn’t miss is the classic test: does it run Doom? Yes, it does. However, this requires accessing the VM through another computer in order to use the keyboard and mouse, which, as user @rexy_moto summarizes, amounts to “using a Mac to control an android running a Windows 11 VM with a game released for MS-DOS.” This is the point that humanity has reached.
It will be interesting to see what other users do to take advantage of this Android 13 feature, which apparently opens many doors for smartphone users by allowing them to run virtually any device that supports ARM. These first kDrag0n developments are undoubtedly spectacular, and knowing the community, this is just the beginning.
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