Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more transpute's commentslogin

AVF is supposedly available on a number of non-Samsung, non-Pixel phones.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-virtual-machine-...


Nested virt with AVF can balance the competing goals of security, usability, freedom, individuals, and corporate supply chains. It can reduce the size and attack surface of the most-privileged code which runs in a system.

Nested virt has been available on x86 for a decade (KVM, Bromium vSentry / HP SureClick, Microsoft Defender App Guard), on Apple Silicon since M2, MacOS since M3 and iPadOS since M4 (Secure eXclave VM). On mobile, it can sidestep some business model conflicts which torpedoed Nokia, RIM, Maemo, Meego, Tizen, etc.

"Virtual Machine as a core Android Primitive" (2023), 160 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38538100


>> On mobile, it can sidestep some business model conflicts which torpedoed Nokia, RIM, Maemo, Meego, Tizen, etc.

Do you have a good link to learn more about that?


Development independence of guest VM from host kernel, security policy, attestation, etc.


Pixel 8/9 have USB-c external display.

Pixel 8/9 Pro have at least 12GB of RAM, with some models (256GB unlocked Obsidian?) having more.


Standard Debian-with-root Arm package repo in pKVM hardware-nested VM with OpenGL (v)GPU remoting! So many years of upstream work across Linux, Android and ChromeOS to make this possible. Now we need phone/tablet OEMs to support Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and OpenTitan-derived enclaves, so this feature can move beyond Pixel hardware.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2025/01/15/the-...

> GFX virtualization aims at providing support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics in virtual machines. Unlike GPU-passthrough, with GFX virtualization the host and all VM guests can access the host GPU simultaneously. Vulkan and OpenGL are supported by virglrenderer using various approaches.. vDRM is a much thinner layer.. able to achieve native GPU performance, where VirGL and Venus may struggle to overcome expensive host/guest synchronizations..at the beginning of 2025, vDRM is partially supported by crosvm.

Hopefully Google's phone-tablet-laptop-desktop convergence of Android, ChromeOS and developer-targeted Debian Linux will motivate Apple to restore iPadOS 16.2 (2022!) virtualization support, https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/discussions/5748.


Samsung supports this on the new Flip 7 as well. Ironically, not on Fold 7 though.

(The Flip is Exynos while the Fold is Qualcomm.)


May be Qualcomm charges extra for using virtualization features on their chips?


Not sure, as far as folks say it's because it doesn't support all the features Android Virt expects on current phone SoCs.


https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pixel-4-killed-motion-s...

> Regulatory issues were likely a major factor that led to the demise of Soli and Motion Sense on future Pixel models. Soli operates in the 60GHz frequency, which is reserved for military and government use in India.. Many of the Google Pixel 4's Motion Sense gestures are available.. Nest Hub's Soli radar extends far enough to detect when you're sleeping, and to track your breathing.


"What Is mmWave Radar?: Everything You Need to Know About FMCW" (2022), 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35312351

"Inside a $1 radar motion sensor" (2024), 100 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834349

"WhoFi: Deep Person Re-Identification via Wi-Fi Channel Signal Encoding" (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685869


Passive WiFi radar does not require the subject to connect to WiFi.

WiFi passes through many walls, floors and ceilings and those reflections can be used for human identification.


"Ambient WiFi RF displacement"


"Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion" (2025), 500 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726

"How Wi-Fi sensing became usable tech" (2024), https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sen...

  There is one area that the IEEE is not working on, at least not directly: privacy and security.. IEEE fellow and member of the Wi-Fi sensing task group.. the goal is to focus on “at least get the sensing measurements done.” He says that the committee did discuss privacy and security: “Some individuals have raised concerns, including myself.” But they decided that while those concerns do need to be addressed, they are not within the committee’s mandate.
2021 privacy comments on Wi-Fi 7 standards work for IEEE 802.11bf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf

> it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking ... since Wi-Fi signals can penetrate hard objects and can be used without the presence of light, end-users may not even realize they are being tracked ... individuals should be provided the opportunity to opt out of SENS services – in other words, to avoid being monitored and tracked by the Wi-Fi devices around them. This would require the widespread introduction of reliable SENS algorithm for human or animal identification.

Would this require a worldwide database of biometric signatures for each human that opts out?


Of course, which is why we shouldn't have ever accepted any industry having the option to implement opt-out regimes.

Of course advertising kinda screwed us in that regard.


MTE is an Arm v9 feature subset of CHERI, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007474 | https://armor.ch/mte/hw

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8439-mte-support-status-for...

> Hardware memory tagging is going to provide a massive increase to protection against remote exploitation for GrapheneOS users. It's the biggest security feature we'll be shipping since we started in 2014.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: