USB disk as /dev/sda on a not-rooted smartphone using Termux, QEMU, Alpine Linux

It's amazing to run this on a not-rooted smartphone.

You can just use a local image too though, what is the news here?

So basically termux-usb let's you access USB devices. I love hacks like this, but I don't see using this for anything real. QEMU is heavy. Would it be possible to modify proot to expose the usb device as a device node and build a termux plugin around it? Then we could have chroot like functionality on a full device without QEMU.

Wouldn’t qemu be a bit faster if it was qemu-system-aarch64?

I'm surprised by the performance. Doesn't qemu have dynamic recompilation capabilities?

This shows how far smartphone hardware is from pals who love to tinker with software.

So ... you can run an x86_64 cpu emulator on a smartphone.<p>That&#x27;s wonderful, and a hundredth of native speed if you are lucky.<p>The example boot log says 2000 BogoMips, so about a fiftieth of the cpu speed of a contemporary entry level laptop, to a very rough approximation.<p>Also, no hardware graphics acceleration.<p>There are some possible uses I suppose. Including the charger and a 3.5&quot; USB hdd I guess it could burn 20 watts to download or upload some torrents, run a IRC client, run a local dev web-server or whatever.<p>If you have a smartphone and don&#x27;t have a raspberry pi or other SBC and have some use for an under powered Linux box then have fun.