On my way to getting Android running on the Sony Vaio P, I thought I would first try to get Android running in a virtual machine. I was going to try kvm and virtualbox. To make sure to run with maximum speed, I wanted to switch on hardware virtualization as I found out that the built in Atom processor should actually be capable of it. Sadly I found out that Sony disabled this feature in the Bios and didn't expose any setting in the Bios to switch it on - what an odd choice (reminds me that I should write a huge rant about Sony concerning taking away the linux support for my Playsations, I am running here for interested students in the office).

I already installed a ubuntu maverick (10.10) on it to avaoid all the hassle I had last time configuring the poulsbo graphic chips (TODO: rant on Intel). This was also my reason for thinking about using a virtual machine as I assumed this would be easier than getting poulsbo support in Android running again (I tried to compile the S5 target - but it of course failed, when compiling the poulsbo support - anybody out there having Android running on a poulsbo equipped netbook?).




To give credit to Sony they changed their support for virtualization in the meanwhile, so there is an updated Bios for the Vaio P giving youo the option to switch it on. However, this update only works in Windows 7 or Vista. Ah, already installed Ubuntu.




As I didn't want to re-install windows, I was looking for different ways to accomplish such a bios update. I foudn some hacks for it in the net, but they seemed to dangerous. So, what about a Windows 7 live CD? Is such a thing possible? It turns out, if you have an original Windows Install DVD, this is in deed quite possible. I used[ http://www.ubcd4win.com/](http://www.ubcd4win.com/). For this I had to install from teh Win 7 DVD first a windows environment itself (used qemu/kvm for it). From there, you can install the software from the beforementioned website and give it access to your DVD (the files, not the iso). Then it works a while and in th eend you get a small 250MB iso image, which actually runs a Windows 7 tiotally from CD, amazing!




I booted the Viao P with this and was able to flash the bios. Qemu/kvm and virtualbox now run accelerated. However accelerated might be a bit too strong word for my following Android -experience. It runs unbearably slow. OK, back to the drawing board - trying poulsbo in android x86? Any pointers how to do this?




Maybe there is an option to run android somehow chroot?




Will keep you posted on my progress.

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