Running Whonix VMs on Android phone?

Unsupported Platforms
1

I was sure this had to be asked before, but I found nothing in search that specifically covers this.

Is there a way to run the Whonix gateway and workstation vms on an android phone?

2

Unsupported.

3

I thought it might be unsupported. This forum said support, but I guess I wanted to ask the general community if anyone was able to do it. Where should I have posted this? Can you move it to the right place or do I need to make a new post?

4

I highly doubt anyone succeeded doing that. It’s highly difficult.

I didn’t say you posted in the wrong place.

You could rephrase your question.

Running Debian VM on Android phone?

I think building on top of the Google operating system Android is futile. Most Android devices sold and in use are surveillance devices with the surveillance operating system Google Android. User freedom is severely restricted.

sources and related:

To my knowledge, there are no Freedom Software virtualizers available for Android, easy to use on most phones.

Even if there was, there use interface for running any Linux desktop operating system would have very bad usability.

I have more hope that there one day would be a “Linux phone”. (I know, technically Android also uses Linux, but doesn’t follow the spirit of Freedom Software Linux desktop distributions due to user freedom restrictions.)

Perhaps a Debian based Linux phone. There is Mobian but I checked just now and it seems there’s no stable release yet.

5

Thanks. I guess it is a bad idea. I forgot that we have no control over what is and isn’t done on the phone. It could send all screen data or anything else to the carrier or even back to Google. Oh well. I will have to put on my thinking cap then.

Slightly related question. Is it possible to get Whonix running on a RISC-V based processor? Like, are all the moving parts able to be compiled for that architecture?

6

If it run KVM or Virtualbox then you can run Whonix, Whonix is unrelated.

7

How is that possible when both KVM and VirtualBox do not emulate. They only run software for a specific architecture on the same architecture. Running Whonix that is not compiled for RISC on VirtualBox would not work. What am I not understanding?

8

I am not sure what “possible” means. If you mean, theoretically, yes.

Practical for users at time of writing? No, not very much. As long as there is no dedicated maintainer and pre-build images for an architecture, users will always struggle with this. Similar situation as for Mac M1.

Probably. Untested. Documented here:

Unfortunately, it’s related. Documented here just now:
Virtualization versus Emulation versus Architecture

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