alt Hacker NewsIs this for real? Do you have any more info on this? It seems crazy to me given how popular their chips are and how many problems I’d imagine this creates
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The other HN comment already has some info, but from what I remember from r/android threads, it's because qualcomm doesn't allow unsecure (sic? unencrypted?) VMs, which, ironically, are needed to run nested Linux.
Disclaimer, my memory on the exact terminology is extremely fuzzy. But pixels with tensor can run it just fine. And it's purely a software thing too, btw.
It should work fine for any Android phone with pKVM support. It runs Debian in a VM, with some kind of Wayland trick (using virgl for GPU acceleration) to get GUI support.
pKVM requires a) a compatible CPU (most CPUs will do, probably), b) compatible firmware/bootloader software, and c) a compatible Android build
The latter two parts are the most likely reason why not all phones have support for this.
It shouldn't be problematic if the processor supports it well. For example modern Windows is always running as a VM and people are barely aware of that.
Using an S24 here and yeah, not available with Android 16
Some more info in this comment and good search terms for further research as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091082