XDA Developers said that Google is developing a streamlined version of Android for virtual machines called MicroDroid. According to the report, according to the commit submitted by Google to AOSP , MicroDroid is called by Google as an Android-based minimal Linux image ("a minimal Android-based Linux image") and will be used in a virtual machine.
Google mentioned in the commit that they did not choose to develop a new Linux image from scratch, but instead designed MicroDroid as a simplified version of the General System Image ( GSI ).
The General System Image ( GSI ) is a pure Android implementation that uses unmodified Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code and can run on various Android devices.
Therefore, MicroDroid is still essentially an Android system, but it will be reduced to the smallest runnable version. XDA believes that this project will help to run a streamlined version of Android on the hypervisor and then be used to virtualize a single Android application, eliminating the need to provide a complete auxiliary desktop environment.
According to XDA's analysis, MicroDroid is likely to be used by Google to improve security for Android hardware devices. LWN once reported that Google introduced the Linux Kernel Virtualization Mechanism called "KVM" to Android devices using ARM64 SoC, but this operation resulted in abnormal system-level permissions, such as DRM and encryption. The third-party code will run in a virtual machine at the same level as the Android system.
If MicroDroid is used, it can communicate with the underlying Android host through its minimal runnable components (such as init and binder services), thus achieving isolation from the main system. Therefore, third-party applications with high permissions can be run on MicroDroid alone to improve security.
It is understood that this project may need to be used with the new Type-1 Hypervisor component of Snapdragon 888. In other words, after the future upgraded version of Android phones equipped with Snapdragon 888, they can obtain safer application isolation operation functions than before, and the isolated applications will not reduce system performance.