Raspberry pi isn't to weak!!!! [discussion]

[Ebert]

For every one that thinks that the raspberry pi is to weak to run, it isn't!!!
I have a lg p350 with a processor of 600mhz and 178 mb of ram and it runs Android jb 4.2.1 smoothly so why should the raspberry pi run it?

[Ebert]

oh and it has also an ARMv6 processor.

[magno23]

we all know that the raspberry pi is capable of running android

[tonyhughes]

Your LG was specifically designed to run with Android. The Pi wasn't.

It isn't about being weak or otherwise.

My Core2Duo laptop is way more powerful than your LG, but I can't natively run Android on it, because its just not designed for it (of course you can emulate Android hardware in x86/x64 OSes).

The Pi is not a strong processor by modern desktop standards, however, for what it was designed for, it provides anywhere from adequate to excellent performance.

Right now I have one as my production server, running Raspbian, Apache2, Drupal 7 CMS, MySQL, Postfix, Dovecot, Squirrelmail, RazorCMS, Wordpress, ProFTPd and more. Heres it's load averages and RAM use right now:

Code: Select all

*******@******** ~/development $ uptime && free -m
 08:58:49 up 37 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.27, 0.28, 0.34
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           485        284        201          0         26        131
-/+ buffers/cache:        126        359
Swap:           99          0         99

Not too shabby. The stats start to look a lot worse when I get multiple concurrent visitors, or a big run of incoming spam, but it does the job.

[lasloHU]

You're right, http://androidpi.wikia.com/wiki/Android_Pi_Wiki

Official Android 4.0.3 (built by Broadcom): Boots, very fast with hardware acceleration, Lacks AudioFlinger support. NOTE: Not yet released by Broadcom!

But I do not, why they do not want to release.
Still the same excuses.

There is no specific need for Android on the Raspi that matches the goals of the foundation

(I know that the Foundation and Broadcom is not the same thing)

[jamesh]

You're right, http://androidpi.wikia.com/wiki/Android_Pi_Wiki

Official Android 4.0.3 (built by Broadcom): Boots, very fast with hardware acceleration, Lacks AudioFlinger support. NOTE: Not yet released by Broadcom!

But I do not, why they do not want to release.
Still the same excuses.

There is no specific need for Android on the Raspi that matches the goals of the foundation

(I know that the Foundation and Broadcom is not the same thing)

If it was in a state where it could be released without a load of extra work, then I guess it would be released, but it's not ready and no-one is working on it, because we have more important things to do. And of course, Android has limited use in a teaching situation (in my opinion, almost no use whatsoever)

[jamesh]

For every one that thinks that the raspberry pi is to weak to run, it isn't!!!
I have a lg p350 with a processor of 600mhz and 178 mb of ram and it runs Android jb 4.2.1 smoothly so why should the raspberry pi run it?

That phone will be using the hardware acceleration of whatever SoC it uses, at the moment there is no HW accelerated release of Android for Raspberry Pi, so Android runs very slowly.

[redhawk]

If it was in a state where it could be released without a load of extra work, then I guess it would be released, but it's not ready and no-one is working on it, because we have more important things to do. And of course, Android has limited use in a teaching situation (in my opinion, almost no use whatsoever)

So in other words hardware accelerated Android on the Pi is never going to happen??

Richard S.

[Cloudcentric]

REGURGITATION - this has been bought up before, why can people not accept that the Pi is a Pi and not supposed to be anything else JEEZ!!!!!

[MrSlacker]

Do you people read??? I don't mean to be a jerk but take 5 minutes... read the forum and anyone with half a mind should be able to decipher why it hasn't happened yet.

1.) The foundation doesn't consider it a priority. We MIGHT see something from them eventually - but don't hold your breathe.

2.) The open-source effort to get the needed libraries ported over is being done by ONE person. No, the drivers being open-sourced isn't what was needed.

The only way to help is to give Warg a hand with the coding, otherwise were all gonna have to wait. It's not a matter or the rPi being underpowered, it's a matter of the effort, developer wise, is undermanned.

[jamesh]

If it was in a state where it could be released without a load of extra work, then I guess it would be released, but it's not ready and no-one is working on it, because we have more important things to do. And of course, Android has limited use in a teaching situation (in my opinion, almost no use whatsoever)

So in other words hardware accelerated Android on the Pi is never going to happen??

Richard S.

I am at a loss to understand how you can conclude that from my post.

I personally think it will happen eventually.

[mrpi64]

WHO SAID IT WAS WEAK??? IT IS NOT!!!

It can run HD movies at full blast,
Minecraft-pi at full blast
Open-arena/doom 3 at full blast!

Minecraft-pi:


Openarena:

[magno23]

nobody said it's weak, the problem is that for android to run smoothly it needs hardware acceleration and for now that is not possible for the chip that raspberry pi uses.
basically you can use android but it will run very slow because the cpu is doing all the work, is almost the same as if wanted to play a game in your computer but without using the graphics card.

[gyeben]

Is Naren still working on this project?

[noob]

will google play be on it?

[6677]

My Core2Duo laptop is way more powerful than your LG, but I can't natively run Android on it, because its just not designed for it (of course you can emulate Android hardware in x86/x64 OSes).

http://www.android-x86.org/

Done, and might I add, works rather nicely. Android on regular x86 hardware is something that has been done repeatedly WITHOUT EMULATION. Not kidding, there is not a single piece of emulation involved for running android on any platform. Android apps are built for the Dalvik virtual machine. As long as there is a functioning version of dalvik (its been demonstrated running on PPC, x86, ARM and MIPS without any issues at all) and the supporting standard libs (easily ported and already available for x86, ARM and MIPS) then your android app should run. For apps using native code then the android NDK automatically creates binaries for ARM and x86 platforms although you can manually over-ride and specify to generate just ARM or just x86 and MIPS or whatever floats your boat (sometimes used in order to upload seperate versions of LARGE apps for x86, ARM and MIPS individually. A user on an ARM phone doesnt want the x86 binaries sitting around hogging 300mb or something when they can't use them, the play store can already sort out which version should be shown for download).

Software like bluestacks on windows is just a functioning dalvik VM and android standard library running on top of windows, all it has to do is run the x86 versions of native apps. The few apps not available on bluestacks are actually the ones which for some reason use native code and don't have x86 variants available. Only emulation of any kind is for things like device sensors and providing a drawing surface on bluestacks and then that doesnt apply at all on bluestacks.

[GreiverBlade]

i dont get all people who say 4.0+ cant work on Rpi ... my tab has a single core (ok 1ghz) and a single core Arm Mali 400mp and ... 512mb ram (btw i dont get why people talk about the 256mb rev.A since the rev.B 512mb was out before) and it runs 4.0.4 like a charm + 4.1.2 test success. i reckon Mali 400mp is more supported but Videocore4 isnt what we can call a weak gpu ...

maybe its more the cpu who is a leash... (the tab has a cortex A8)

the all part of " your device doesnt meet the requirement" for jelly Bean is a enormous joke since i've seen many smartphone with less than what's demanded running 4.1.2 smooth I.T.S juste a commercial argument to force you to buy "the last one in date"

so single core 512mb ram can run it... basically just need Broadcom driver and a bit of tweaking and no false excuse as "no it cant run it" or "i think the cpu/gpu is too weak" until its proved that a fully optimised port cant run stable because of those "weakness"

oh well i dont care about android developement since i use my tab or a UMI X1 allready but i hate false argument (since no full port has beeen out then its not "sure" it doesnt work

juste be patient and wait on dev (or do like the other one said ... propose fundraising to get it ... even if its kinda off for a open source os (ok Android isnt quite open source but still) every work is worth the money)

[appiehappie94]

i dont get all people who say 4.0+ cant work on Rpi ... my tab has a single core (ok 1ghz) and a single core Arm Mali 400mp and ... 512mb ram (btw i dont get why people talk about the 256mb rev.A since the rev.B 512mb was out before) and it runs 4.0.4 like a charm + 4.1.2 test success. i reckon Mali 400mp is more supported but Videocore4 isnt what we can call a weak gpu ...

maybe its more the cpu who is a leash... (the tab has a cortex A8)

the all part of " your device doesnt meet the requirement" for jelly Bean is a enormous joke since i've seen many smartphone with less than what's demanded running 4.1.2 smooth I.T.S juste a commercial argument to force you to buy "the last one in date"

so single core 512mb ram can run it... basically just need Broadcom driver and a bit of tweaking and no false excuse as "no it cant run it" or "i think the cpu/gpu is too weak" until its proved that a fully optimised port cant run stable because of those "weakness"

oh well i dont care about android developement since i use my tab or a UMI X1 allready but i hate false argument (since no full port has beeen out then its not "sure" it doesnt work

juste be patient and wait on dev (or do like the other one said ... propose fundraising to get it ... even if its kinda off for a open source os (ok Android isnt quite open source but still) every work is worth the money)

You still have your own choice of buying a better smartphone if you want to. So what you do with the commercial talk of those big companies, is still your own decision.
And as far as I can say (I owned HTC HD2, Galaxy S Plus, Galaxy S2, HTC One X, (now) Galaxy Nexus) that I can really see the performance difference between one's hardware and another. I just disliked the Tegra processor in the HTC One X (heat and lagging) that I got back to the Galaxy Nexus, before anyone asks me why I did that. But let's not jabber too much about smartphones, because it's the Pi's forum.

Now... First of all, Android IS! open source (unless you can tell me which part isn't). You can download the source right away (with a Linux distro, as far as I know). If you can't get the source, just try CyanogenMod.

I do agree with you that the minimum requirements to run Android are a little off, but they were also taking the opinions of a normal user. The "real" minimum requirements would be even less. For example: We as Pi-lovers are willing to wait 2 minutes (loosely chosen number) for our small creditcard-computer to boot, but a normal user will not. You get the point?

Now the real point of this all is: We need hardware acceleration!
(I almost know nothing about this part, but since everyone is yelling about it, I will yell with you people! I do know that brute-force (hacking?) through some Nvidia graphics cards is waaaay faster than doing it through a CPU. That's probably all I know.)

Now the GPU is pretty strong on the RPi, so I guess that this has something to do with "doing calculations more quickly through the GPU, than through the CPU".
I just love the fact that it can play 1080p movies. This sure shows some of the power in this little thing. Ghehehe... Power to the Pi!

I'd find it great to see Android coming to this device (with hardware acceleration). But it does lack educational value. And I guess that if we really want this... we can better buy the Ouya (crowd-funded, low budget, Android running, Rubik's cube sized, gaming device)...

I will let my fingers rest now...