Hello there!
I’m one of the maintainers of Ubuntu Touch and would like to give Snaps an opportunity to shine on our beloved mobile OS. I’ve started an investigation on how to enable our mainly libhybris-based selection of devices to allow running Snaps effectively and efficiently a few months back and would like to share the information with you, to further allow the implementation of Snaps to happen on Ubuntu Touch.
The way Ubuntu Touch developed, it stayed pretty much a hybrid-design between Snap-based and classic-based Ubuntu. We have a read-only rootfs with various /var, /etc and so on directories moved and bind-mounted over to a /userdata partition (which is always provided by the Android partitioning scheme). Additionally though we run a minimal, stripped down version of Android in a LXC container, solely for the purpose of driving the hardware using blobs shipped by the vendors, and using a vendor kernel.
With Ubuntu Touch based on 20.04 we support kernels 3.18 and up, which means very little new features pour into our device port kernels. The exception is AppArmor which we mostly clone from Ubuntu’s kernel git history, importing the closest security/apparmor changes to the version of the vendor kernel.
Now, to support Snaps on our unique device-kernel-rootfs design a few things need to happen:
- Enable OpenGL drivers to work in a Snap environment
- Allow certain /android directories to be mounted over into the Snap
- Have the glibc-based OpenGL & EGL wrappers use bionic-based OpenGL libraries
- Enable Snaps to communicate through Android’s binder interfaces
As a result of many of those 4 points being taken care of already in an initial patch set, we get this:
These are Wayland apps running on the Pixel 3a on Ubuntu 20.04, in wireless desktop mode.
I would like to get some initial feedback or ideas of how you would like to see this implemented. I can of course clean up the patches and propose them in parallel while we work out general questions.
