Research On Direct Android Emulation For Heavy Mobile Applications

Mobile emulators fundamentally support the research,development,debugging,large-scale deployment,and cross-platform execution of mobile operating systems(Android and i OS)and their applications.In the past two decades,in order to meet the ever-increasing performance demands of mobile applications,and take the slowdown in PC computing power into account,academia and industry have improved the emulation efficiency by continuously upgrading the architecture of mobile simulators.Currently,after several rounds of architecture iterations,the most commonly used mobile emulation technology on PCs is Android-x86 On Virtual Box(abbreviated as AOVB),which uses the full virtualization architecture of Virtual Box to run Android-x86 systems.AOVB help users run most mobile applications smoothly on PC.However,for heavy mobile applications,especially 3D game applications with huge graphics computations(such as Tencent's "PUBGM"),emulation efficiency is still unsatisfactory,leading to the slow smoothness of mobile applications and frequent stuttering that plagues users.The root cause is that AOVB solves the high heterogeneity between mobile applications and PCs in instruction sets,operating systems,and media devices by a fully virtualized architecture,which puts a relatively low upper bound on emulators.In order to break through the bottleneck of emulation efficiency,this paper explores and develops Direct Android emulation On Windows(abbreviated as DAOW)for heavy mobile applications.DAOW realizes the direct executable of Android applications on x86 Windows for the first time.DAOW eliminates the extra computational overhead of full virtualization.Based on practical and efficient instruction rewriting and system call emulation mechanism,DAOW provides Android external processes with direct access to host computer hardware through the Windows kernel interface,allows Android applications to run at the speed close to the native hardware performance.In addition,DAOW uses graphics technology to overcome media device differences,enhances users' mobile application experience on PCs,and adopts kernel-level security technology to prevent possible mobile application cheating.Direct Android emulation technology has been adopted by Tencent mobile emulator,with more than 50 million users benefited and more than 8,000 heavy-duty 3D applications emulated.It is the most efficient mobile emulation software in the world.Compared to AOVB,mobile applications have 21% faster smoothness(most heavy 3D applications can run on low-end PCs without stuttering),48% faster boot time,and 22% lower memory usage.