Mike

Strange that google is the only option for the only “secure” operating system.

The have their reasons: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

Hey, do you know what is Ring Level minus One ?

I know you’re only trolling here and I’m feeding into it, but you nerd sniped me just right to explain why your question is stupid on multiple fronts.

First of all, “Ring -1” is the hypervisor, at least on virtualization-capable devices (which modern Pixels are), and the hypervisor will be Linux’s KVM in this case, which is open source and compiled by the Graphene team as part of the kernel from source.

Secondly, Arm (which is the architecture basically all phone chips use, including Pixels) has a slightly different model of security, where apps are Exception Level 0, the OS is EL1, the hypervisor is EL2, and the “secure monitor” (or management firmware) is EL3 (and is probably what you were trying to refer to).

So yeah, I don’t think you know what “Ring -1” is. At least not enough to warrant a snarky comment.

I mean… This is kinda close. The “Linux Terminal” app is running a full Debian install in a KVM VM. On the newest version of the app (like on Android beta or on GrapheneOS), you even have a full GUI that you can use.

In theory, we should be able to boot any mainline Linux distro in a VM, if someone writes an app for it, as AVF (Android Virtualization Framework) is just a wrapper around Linux KVM with some restrictions. (for now the built-in app only supports Debian)

in the latest preview build

i assume you didn’t install today’s beta release a month ago 😉

EDIT: nevermind, i re-read your comment… it’s mandatory in some regions, I know for sure it’s mandatory in the US and in Hungary (EU).

One other thing is that if you created the installer with Rufus, that adds some magic optionally that can bypass it. I wonder if that still works with this beta.