FrostNovaHD / TrinityEmulator

Trinity is an Android emulator designed to simultaneously meet the goals of good compatibility, security and efficiency with the novel notion of graphics projection space.

Trinity: High-Performance Mobile Emulation through Graphics Projection

This is the Artifact README for Trinity---an Android emulator designed to simultaneously meet the goals of good compatibility, security and efficiency with our novel notion of graphics projection space.

1. Getting Started with Trinity

• Hardware Requirements

  You should run Trinity on a WinTel (Windows-x64 on Intel) machine, with an NVIDIA dedicated GPU installed with the latest driver (over version 497.09) if possible (no dedicated GPU is also acceptable), as this hardware/software combination is much more tested than the others. Minimal hardware configurations include:

  • 4-core CPU
  • 8 GB memory
  • 1920x1080 display
  • 128 GB storage

• Software Prerequisites

  1. Ensure that you have turned on Intel VT in the BIOS settings. By default, this is turned on for most PCs.
  2. Check whether Windows' Hyper-V if it's enabled (how to determine Hyper-V's state).
  3. If not, install Intel HAXM (recommended version is v7.6.5. Extract the downloaded ZIP file, and simply double-click haxm-7.6.5-setup.exe to install.
  • NOTE: Hyper-V generally provides better CPU performance over HAXM. So we recommend using Hyper-V if possible. Our program is capable of detecting Hyper-V and automatically choosing it when applicable. Also, on Windows 22H2, HAXM seems to show some buggy behaviors that prevent the guest OS from loading into the virtual memory, in which case it's better you enable Hyper-V instead.

• Running the Released Binary

  We provide a packaged binary here. Download and extract the ZIP file, double-click the executable Trinity.exe in the extracted folder to run. Press Enter when the boot option is Run Android-x86 without installation.

2. Detailed Instructions

2.1. Guest OS Installation

Running without installation allows you to quickly see what is Trinity capable of. But it also makes the virtual storage volatile (i.e., the next boot will erase all data) and small-size (up to only 8 GB available space).

Before you can fully enjoy Trinity, you may want to install the Android-x86 image during system boot. Refer to our wiki for more detailed instructions.

2.2. Usages and Problem Resolving

Use Trinity as you use your mobile phones. Trinity's guest OS is packed with @OpenGApps, therefore you can install any apps from the Google Play Store we host, even ARM-based ones! Other important notes are listed below.

• For establishing ADB connection with Trinity, see here.

• If Trinity freezes on certain machines (perhaps during your first boot without installation), see here.

• If Trinity cannot function properly after installation, see here.

• If Trinity cannot start properly, send us the log.txt file in the root directory of the binary.

2.3. Result Reproducing

We provide 1) our own measurement data and script to reproduce the figures in our paper, and 2) detailed guides and videos for running our experiments independently.

Please go to our wiki page for more details.

3. Artifact Claims

• Reproducibility. To reproduce results similar to that shown in our paper, hardware configurations of your evaluation machines are of vital importance. This is because our key results of graphics benchmarks test the extreme performance of the evaluated emulators. In particular, even if the hardware configurations are exactly the same, the running states of the host machines (e.g., CPU/GPU occupation and heat level) can also impact the results. We recommend you check your hardware settings before evaluation as suggested here.

• Stability. Trinity is not yet stable, especially the version we release is that of the paper submission time to prevent recent fixes/improvements from affecting the evaluation results. Therefore, freezing and crashing can sometimes happen, normally a system reboot can resolve the issues.

The following parts of README are not important to the running of Trinity and result reproducing, feel free to skip them if you do not wish to build Trinity from scratch.

4. Code Organization

Trinity is based on QEMU 5.0. Most of the code here remains consistent with the upstream QEMU, while our modifications are mostly decoupled modules. Therefore it's easy to upgrade to higher versions of QEMU (tested also on QEMU 5.1). We detail our modifications as follows:

Module	Purpose
hw/direct-express	This additional module implements the data teleporting mechanism described in our paper, which is a general-purpose data transfering pipeline between the guest and host. Leveraging a specially designed packet protocol, one can realize fast bidirectional data delivering under considerable system and data dynamics. The module here mostly serves the purpose of retrieving data from the guest and dispatches the data to a designated thread specified by the data packet.
hw/express-gpu	This module implements the host rendering engine that leverages the shadow contexts and resource handles in the graphics projection space to manage real contexts and resources at the host, while drawing actual frames on a window. It also provides host-side hints for realizing flow control.

Other minor changes to the vanilla QEMU includ the general keyboard mapping and input device to achieve cross-platform compatibility.

5. Build

We use git submodule to hold some of the essential modules. Thus, after git clone, you should also run git submodule update --init --recursive at the repo's root directory.

Windows

• Environment & Dependencies

  The building of Trinity on Windows (tested on 64-bit Win 10/11 Home/Professional/LTSC) should be performed under the MSYS2 environment. Your environment setup should include:

  1. Download and install MSYS2 following the instructions at https://www.msys2.org/. CRITICAL NOTE: DO NOT INSTALL MSYS AT PATH THAT CONTAINS A SPACE, e.g., C:/Program Files.

  2. Open the MSYS2 MinGW x64 terminal (CRITICAL NOTE: NOT THE MSYS2 MSYS TERMINAL) and install dependencies using:

     pacman -S base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-binutils mingw-w64-x86_64-crt-git mingw-w64-x86_64-headers-git mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-libs mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-gdb mingw-w64-x86_64-make mingw-w64-x86_64-tools-git mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config mingw-w64-x86_64-winpthreads-git mingw-w64-x86_64-libwinpthread-git mingw-w64-x86_64-winstorecompat-git mingw-w64-x86_64-libmangle-git mingw-w64-x86_64-pixman mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 mingw-w64-x86_64-glib2 mingw-w64-x86_64-capstone mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw mingw-w64-x86_64-lzo2 mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 mingw-w64-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng

  3. Additional environmental adjustments (also executed at the MSYS terminal):

     cp /mingw64/bin/ar.exe /mingw64/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-ar.exe & cp /mingw64/bin/ranlib.exe /mingw64/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-ranlib.exe & cp /mingw64/bin/windres.exe /mingw64/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-windres.exe & cp /mingw64/bin/objcopy.exe /mingw64/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-objcopy.exe & cp /mingw64/bin/nm.exe /mingw64/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-nm.exe & cp /mingw64/bin/strip.exe /mingw64/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-strip.exe

• Configure

  cd to the root directory of the repo at the MSYS terminal (note that you cannot use a typical Windows path such as C:/XXX for cd, instead you can simply drag and drop the repo to the terminal to acquire its path in MSYS), input the following to configure: ./configure --cross-prefix=x86_64-w64-mingw32- --disable-gtk --enable-sdl --enable-whpx --target-list=x86_64-softmmu --disable-werror

• Compile

  After the configuration, simply type make install -j$(nproc).

• Run the Built Trinity

  We provide a proxy executable for running Trinity. Therefore, all you need to do is: Download the guest system’s images (Android_x86_64.iso and hda.img) and the executable (Trinity.exe) packed in the Trinity.zip file, put them at the root directory of the repo, and execute the executable at the MSYS2 MinGW x64 terminal (directly click on the file may not work due to missing dlls) to run Trinity.

  Otherwise, if you wish to run Trinity in terminals rather than the executable, you can run the following command at the root directory of Trinity if you use Hyper-V

  .\\x86_64-softmmu\\qemu-system-x86_64.exe -accel whpx -cpu android64 -m 4096 -smp 4 -machine usb=on -device usb-kbd -device usb-tablet -boot menu=on -soundhw hda -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:5555 -device direct-express-pci -display sdl -hda hda.img -cdrom android_x86_64.iso
  

  If you use HAXM, run the following

  .\\x86_64-softmmu\\qemu-system-x86_64.exe -accel hax -cpu android64 -m 4096 -smp 4 -machine usb=on -device usb-kbd -device usb-tablet -boot menu=on -soundhw hda -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:5555 -device direct-express-pci -display sdl -hda hda.img -cdrom android_x86_64.iso
  

6. Developing

To debug the code, you can use the GDB provided by MSYS2. You may need to examine which GDB is used by checking the output of configuration. The last few lines should contain the location of the used GDB. Normally, it should be /mingw64/bin/gdb-multiarch.exe or /mingw64/bin/gdb.exe

7. Licensing

Our code is under the GPLv2 license.

8. Reference

If you use Trinity in your work, please reference it using

@inproceedings {gao2022trinity,
    author = {Gao, Di and Lin, Hao and Li, Zhenhua and Huang, Chengen and Liu, Yunhao and Qian, Feng and Gong, Liangyi and Xu, Tianyin},
    title = {{Trinity: High-Performance Mobile Emulation through Graphics Projection}},
    booktitle = {The 16th {USENIX} Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation ({OSDI} 22)},
    year = {2022},
    publisher = {{USENIX} Association}
  }