Consider Android development Codespace

[vcsjones]

I've found myself occasionally wishing for a Codespace that was ready-to-go for Android development.

Is there an appetite for an Android Codespace? Ideally the Codespace would

1. Get the NDK/SDK set up
2. Get an emulator image
3. Do a build of -rc release -s mono+libs
4. Start an emulator with postStartCommand so the emulator is running when the Codespace starts.

If anyone else thinks this is a good idea, I'm happy to work on a devcontainer.json+Dockerfile for this, but would probably need someone with Administrative permissions to set up prebuilds, assuming we even want a prebuild of this.

/cc @eerhardt

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Issue Details

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I've found myself occasionally wishing for a Codespace that was ready-to-go for Android development.

Is there an appetite for an Android Codespace? Ideally the Codespace would

1. Get the NDK/SDK set up
2. Get an emulator image
3. Do a build of -rc release -s mono+libs
4. Start an emulator with postStartCommand so the emulator is running when the Codespace starts.

If anyone else thinks this is a good idea, I'm happy to work on a devcontainer.json+Dockerfile for this, but would probably need someone with Administrative permissions to set up prebuilds, assuming we even want a prebuild of this.

/cc @eerhardt

Author:	vcsjones
Assignees:	-
Labels:	area-Meta
Milestone:	-

[marek-safar]

/cc @steveisok

[steveisok]

Not a bad idea. We'll look into it.

[eerhardt]

Note that with #74683 we now have separate Codespace configurations for different development environments. So adding more configurations should be easy, albeit there may be duplication because you can't share/refactor devcontainer.json files.

[ghost]

Tagging subscribers to 'arch-android': @steveisok, @akoeplinger
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Issue Details

---

I've found myself occasionally wishing for a Codespace that was ready-to-go for Android development.

Is there an appetite for an Android Codespace? Ideally the Codespace would

1. Get the NDK/SDK set up
2. Get an emulator image
3. Do a build of -rc release -s mono+libs
4. Start an emulator with postStartCommand so the emulator is running when the Codespace starts.

If anyone else thinks this is a good idea, I'm happy to work on a devcontainer.json+Dockerfile for this, but would probably need someone with Administrative permissions to set up prebuilds, assuming we even want a prebuild of this.

/cc @eerhardt

Author:	vcsjones
Assignees:	steveisok
Labels:	area-Meta, os-android
Milestone:	8.0.0

[vcsjones]

I spent a little bit of time this afternoon trying to get this working and I got very far... then hit a blocker at the last step.

/dev/kvm does not get mapped inside the docker container for Codespaces, so KVM is not available, and neither is nested virtualization.

We can disable hardware acceleration with -no-accel but that comes with a few problems.

1. Boot time is bad. The emulator takes 10 minutes to boot - and that's after I slimmed it down as much as I could by disabling bluetooth, display output, etc.
2. Test time is bad. Some things are "okay" like System.IO.Hashing, but System.Security.Cryptography is... indeterminable. I stopped waiting after 45 minutes.
3. Emulation is emulation and its bound to subtle bugs.

A smaller but not-so-bad issue is that the emulators require a lot of disk space - at least 64 GB. So the minimum Codespace spec is 8 core / 64 GB of storage.

At this point the only thing the Codespace is good for is building the code - but not running it, which I think largely defeats the point of why I wanted the Codespace.

I don't think a Codespace is suitable for Android development right now. I think we should close this, but I'll leave it open in case someone has ideas on making this suitable.

[vcsjones]

Okay - I actually have a way forward with this thanks to some inside help at GitHub.