A High Performance Implementation Of Virtual Win32 Environment In Android System

With technologies like virtual machine, compatibility layer and instruction simulation, applications built for one operating system or processor can be executed above another. However, there’s few researches on depolying these technologies in Android, a very important operating system developed in the past few years. To solve the problem that we are still lacking in professional software in the Android ecosystem and there’s no trustable open-source implementation for some applications related to privacy and security, we propose a framework to allow unmodified Windows programs in x86 instructions to run on ARM-based Android platforms efficiently. In the proposed framework, the execution of x86 instructions on ARM platforms is implemented by utilizing the dynamic binary translation technology provided by QEMU. Meanwhile, with the help of Wine,a compatibility layer, Win32 API calls are converted to invocations to the base libraries in Linux. In this way, full system virtualization is avoided.The X protocol is used for the communication between applications and the display server, and the user interface is rendered in the virtual framebuffer by the display server. Finally, the adaption to the Android graphics stack is achieved by using the VNC protocol. Our experiment result shows that the proposed framework is far better than solutions based on full system virtual machines in aspects like memory consumption, startup time and performance, and it could be a high performance implementation of virtual Win32 environment in Android system.