Porting an operating system to a completely different architecture is a lot of work. As such, it's not surprising that the Android x86 project ― which aims to get Android running on traditional Intel/AMD x86 computers ― usually lags quite a bit behind mainline releases. The team released its first Oreo build last year, and now a stable version is available.

The newest release is based on Android 8.1 Oreo, and includes plenty of modifications to make Google's OS more functional on x86 PCs. It uses Linux kernel 4.19.15, so a wide variety of hardware is supported, with OpenGL ES 3.0 hardware acceleration on Intel, AMD, and Nvidia graphics. Vulkan support is included as an experimental feature, and the OS can even run with UEFI Secure Boot enabled.

Here's the full list of features:

  • Support both 64-bit and 32-bit kernel and userspace with latest LTS kernel 4.19.15.
  • Support OpenGL ES 3.x hardware acceleration for Intel, AMD, Nvidia and QEMU(virgl) by Mesa 18.3.1.
  • Support OpenGL ES 2.0 via SwiftShader for software rendering on unsupported GPU devices.
  • Support hardware accelerated codecs on devices with Intel HD & G45 graphics family.
  • Support secure booting from UEFI and installing to UEFI disk.
  • A text based GUI installer.
  • Add theme support to GRUB-EFI.
  • Support Multi-touch, Audio, Wifi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Camera and Ethernet (DHCP only).
  • Auto-mount external usb drive and sdcard.
  • Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
  • Enable ForceDefaultOrientation on devices without known sensors. Portrait apps can run in a landscape device without rotating the screen.
  • Support arm arch apps via the native bridge mechanism. (Settings -> Android-x86 options)
  • Support to upgrade from non-official releases.
  • Add experimental Vulkan support for newer Intel and AMD GPUs. (Boot via Advanced options -> Vulkan support)
  • Mouse integration support for VMs including VirtualBox, QEMU, VMware and Hyper-V.

The release is available for both 64-bit and 32-bit x86 systems as a bootable CD/USB image. You can download it from the source link below, and if you find it useful, the project is taking donations.

Source: Android x86