Fedora 21 chrooted on an aarch64 Nexus 9

A while back I bought a Nexus 9, mainly because it has a weird processor that emulates a 64 bit ARM (aarch64). Google seem to have abandoned this platform entirely, just 6 months after I got it, so fuck you too Google. Anyway here’s how I installed a Fedora 21 aarch64 chroot on the device, using virt-builder and virt-tar-out and a bunch of unnecessary hassle.

First I ran virt-builder, which takes under a minute to produce a Fedora 21 aarch64 disk image. I then used virt-tar-out to convert all the files in that disk image into a tar file:

$ virt-builder --arch aarch64 fedora-21
$ virt-tar-out -a fedora-21.img / chroot.tar

Copy this file over to the N9, and unpack it. I have rooted my N9, so I can do this as root to preserve all the permissions etc:

# mkdir root
# cd root
# tar -xf /sdcard/Download/chroot.tar
# cd ..

And how can there not be a tar utility in Android?? I had to build a static ‘tar’ for aarch64 using my existing aarch64 server, to run the above command. And and and how can there be no chroot utility either!? I ended up compiling that myself too yada yada.

After all that you can do:

# mount -o bind /dev root/dev
# mount -o bind /proc root/proc
# mount -o bind /sys root/sys
# PATH=/usr/bin:/bin LD_PRELOAD= chroot root /bin/bash

which gives me at least a Fedora 21 shell on Android.

Edit: A few further notes:

1. When setting up a non-root user account inside the chroot, give it the same UID, GID and groups as the ordinary non-privileged Android user account. In particular it must be in the inet group, else network access is blocked.
2. You may need to set up /etc/resolv.conf by hand in the chroot.