What specs do the grapheneOS devs use for their local development

ACuriousFellow

As the title suggests, I am interested to know what setup the graphene devs use on a day to day basis.

Google suggests many cores and at least 64gb ram, what do you guys use ?

The reason I ask is I'm interested in real world dev and how long a full build and incremental builds take on any particular hardware.

Cheers

grayway2

ACuriousFellow you'll not get a response from devs about this.

They try to keep such information as secret as possible to avoid tailored attacks.

soupslurpr

ACuriousFellow hello! While my setup isn't as fast as others are, it works for now. I use my Framework 13 AMD laptop (AMD 7640U) with 64 GB of RAM (but only 56 GB assigned to the VM) to build GrapheneOS in a Linux VM (WSL) for development. It takes 3 hours and 40 minutes for a clean build for the lynx-cur-userdebug target.

Incremental builds are fairly fast though, maybe 20 seconds usually.

de0u

ACuriousFellow Based on experience, as of early 2025, 32 GB is a genuine impediment and should be avoided; 64 GB is workable if you are using prebuilt kernels and Vanadium. But keep in mind that the resource demands have been going up over time, so boxing oneself in to a 64 GB max might be unfortunate ~~later~~ in a year or two.

soupslurpr

grayway2 this isn't true. Essentially, 5950X or 7950X with 64 GB or preferably 128 GB is probably your best bet.

soupslurpr

Sub-hour times are possible, with good enough hardware.

ACuriousFellow

Thanks so much for the replies, it shows the hardware I was looking at would be grossly underpowered haha.

One more question if I may, soupslurpr do you use android studio for platform as an ide for dev and debugging?

dhhdjbd

Would it not be kind of similar to ASOP compile time/ hardware recommendations?

I mean maybe just look for what they people use for this/ you ar more likely to find bechmarks for this

grayway2

soupslurpr I forgot you :) you're probably the only one who's seriously involved in the project to openly talk about this.

ACuriousFellow

soupslurpr hi. Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I had a question.

Once you've built a test build of grapheme are you able to run it locally on your PC or do you have to flash it to a device?

After running the m command I don't have an emulator that will run, only of I use

source build/envsetup.sh
lunch sdk_phone64_x86_64-cur-user
m aapt2

Which seems to be stock android

DeletedUser237

grayway2 Maybe other devs are more active in other channels or simply don't want to repeat themselves.. Also as soupslurpr said, disclosing your hardware (like saying I have this CPU, this amount of ram etc) won't make you any more targetable. It simply does not work that way..

other8026

I saw this shared over a year ago, so maybe they have newer ones, but here's what was said in a public room on Matrix:

the official build hardware is 3 workstations: Ryzen 7950X with 128GB DDR5, i9-13900K with 128GB DDR4, Ryzen 5950X with 128GB DDR4

grayway2

other8026 and what OS ?

soupslurpr

ACuriousFellow yep

Stan804

I'm not sure what hardware they use, but I can say what I personally use and my build times are.

For my main PC, I have an i9 9900k and 128GB DDR4, leading build times to be around 2 hours and 45 minutes for a full build.
I also sometimes build on my server with an i7 13700K and 128gb DDR5 (64GB assigned to the build VM), and I get around 1 hour and 30 minutes for a full build.

soupslurpr

ACuriousFellow hi, no worries. I haven't used the emulator in a while, I use real devices now that I got some for development purposes.

What command do you use to run the emulator?

Actually, maybe make a new thread for your question, feel free to ping me in it.

Or you can join the development chat room on discord or matrix.

charles25565

I think you have to run the emulator command (cite).

Although I've never actually successfully compiled Android before.