Trinity: High-Performance Mobile Emulation through Graphics Projection

Mobile emulation, which creates full-fledged software mobile devices on a physical PC/server, is pivotal to the mobile ecosystem, especially for PC-based mobile gaming, app debugging, and malware detection. Unfortunately, existing mobile emulators perform poorly on graphics-intensive apps in terms of either efficiency or compatibility or both. To address this, we introduce graphics projection, a novel graphics virtualization mechanism that adds a small-size projection space inside the guest memory of a virtual mobile device. The projection space processes graphics operations involving control contexts and resource handles without host interactions. Novel flow control and data teleporting mechanisms are devised to match the decoupled graphics processing rates of the virtual device and the host GPU to maximize performance. The resulting new Android emulator, dubbed Trinity, exhibits an average of 93.3% native hardware performance and 97.2% app support, in some cases outperforming other emulators by more than an order of magnitude. It has been adopted by Huawei DevEco Studio, a major Android IDE with millions of developers.