Running Android on my own hypervisor — what I learned in one month. 11 partitions, 1.7GB sparse images.

Short summary

The author details a month-long effort to run Android (AOSP) as a guest on IONA OS, a sovereign operating system written in Rust, using a custom hypervisor at EL2. The post walks through seven concrete boot problems — missing kernel parameters, GPT partition tables, sparse image conversion, AVB verification, APEX module ambiguities, F2FS filesystem mismatches, and PSCI emulation — with specific fixes for each. The result is a booting Android system running alongside IONA OS in isolated EL1/EL0 contexts.

• •Built a custom Rust hypervisor at EL2 to run AOSP Android alongside IONA OS
• •Solved 7 concrete boot problems including GPT disks, sparse images, AVB, and PSCI emulation
• •Android boots successfully with non-critical HALs skipped

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