1.20.0¶

The Anbox Cloud team is pleased to announce the release of Anbox Cloud 1.20.0.

Please see Component versions for a list of updated components.

New features & improvements¶

Anbox Cloud has introduced support for creating virtual machine instances. This is especially helpful for use cases that require a stronger isolation. You can use both containers and virtual machines for your applications. However, GPU support is not yet available for virtual machine instances.

For easy understanding, we have introduced a change in terminology as well. The Anbox Cloud containers or LXD containers are now called Instances. The term Instance in the Anbox Cloud documentation denotes a container or a virtual machine that hosts an application or an image.
The Anbox Management Service (AMS) snaps use core22.
AMS downloads the image from the image server only at first use instead of downloading all available images.
The watchdog can be enabled without specifying a boot package in the application manifest.
The Anbox Cloud images no longer start android.hardware.media.c2 services automatically.
The included Mesa driver is tracking the latest 23.2.1 version and the virglrenderer is also tracking the latest upstream.
Some improvements to the swagger response for the AMS HTTP API are included.
The communication between LXD and AMS is improved and more robust.

The required NVIDIA driver version has been updated from the 525 series to 535 series.
Alpha quality support for Vulkan on NVIDIA GPUs is now available through a feature flag. To use this feature, you require newer NVIDIA drivers (versions 545 or later). Since the feature is at Alpha level, bugs and crashes can occur. If you are interested in early testing, contact us through the users forum on discourse. Stable product support for this feature is planned for the 1.21 release.

With the 1.20.0 release, we have made the following improvements to the web dashboard experience:

Android security updates for November 2023 (see Android Security Bulletin - November 2023 for more information).
The Android WebView has been updated to 119.0.6045.66.
We have modernised the existing NATS charm to align with best practices in developing charms. The new NATS charm is available at https://charmhub.io/nats. The 1.21.0 release of Anbox Cloud will automatically upgrade to the new charm.

The Instance type attribute is deprecated now. You can use the resources attribute to specify any custom resource requirements.

Also, in the Anbox Cloud documentation, the use of the term Instance type to indicate a set of resources is deprecated and will be completely removed in the future releases. Instead, the term Resource preset is used to indicate a set of resources available for an instance.

The Mesa build in /opt/mesa is removed.
The Grafana and Prometheus tools for monitoring are removed. The Anbox Cloud roadmap has plans of providing a monitoring solution using the Canonical Observability Stack.

The following bugs are fixed in the Anbox Cloud 1.20 version:

Permission errors when Android tries to access cgroup.
Missing support for VPU slots for amc commands.
LP 2031059 When streaming from a tablet, the display area is partially blocked even after the client side keyboard is closed.
Android screen timeout is not disabled by default, This causes a blank screen during streaming.
When an application that was created in a version earlier than 1.19.0 does not have the video-encoder attribute in its manifest, new versions of that application are not uploaded to the Anbox Application Registry (AAR).

See How to upgrade Anbox Cloud or How to upgrade the Anbox Cloud Appliance for instructions on how to update your Anbox Cloud deployment to the 1.20 release.