Running Android VMs on ARM: Rebuilding the Minisforum MS-R1 Kernel for Cuttlefish

Part 1 of 2. This part covers getting a kernel that can actually host virtual machines. Why bother I wanted a box that could run a dozen Android instances at once — real ones, not emulated-on-x86 ones — to benchmark peer-to-peer sync behaviour at scale. Native arm64 Android on native arm64 silicon, no translation layer, enough cores and RAM to make the peer count interesting. The Minisforum MS-R1 looked ideal. It's built on the CIX P1 ("Sky1"), a 12-core ARMv9 SoC, and it's one of the first genuinely affordable ARM desktops with server-class amounts of memory. Google's Cuttlefish — AOSP's official virtual device — runs arm64 Android guests on arm64 hosts with KVM acceleration, with a --num_instances=N flag that does exactly what I wanted. Everything lined up. Then I hit this: $ sudo modprobe vhost_vsock modprobe: FATAL: Module vhost_vsock not found in directory /lib/modules/6.6.10-cix-build-generic This post is what it took to fix that. If you have this hardware and want to run VMs on it, you'll hit the same wall, and there are four separate traps between you and the other side. I hit all of them so you don't have to. Rough time: an afternoon. Most of it is a compile you can walk away from. The problem: no vhost, no Cuttlefish Cuttlefish uses vsock — a virtual socket transport — for all communication between the host and its guest VMs. ADB, logs, control messages, everything. Without /dev/vhost-vsock , Cuttlefish doesn't start. It's not a soft dependency. The kernel Minisforum ships is 6.6.10-cix-build-generic . Check what it thinks about virtualization: grep -E 'VHOST' /boot/config- $( uname -r ) On mine, the output was more interesting for what was missing than what was there: # CONFIG_VHOST_NET is not set CONFIG_VHOST_VSOCK doesn't appear at all — not even as "is not set". That happens when the parent CONFIG_VHOST symbol is disabled, so Kconfig never emits the dependent symbols. The vendor didn't disable vsock specifically; they disabled the entire vhost subsyste