Would be interesting if you know of any evidence about being an architectural hw limitation. Though of course the practical difference may be small if the DRM bootloader enforces loading the hypervisor through cryptographic checksums. But I guess if a customer asked they would allow it and the hardware could do it.

Using an S24 here and yeah, not available with Android 16

It shouldn't be problematic if the processor supports it well. For example modern Windows is always running as a VM and people are barely aware of that.

Some more info in this comment and good search terms for further research as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091082

The other HN comment already has some info, but from what I remember from r/android threads, it's because qualcomm doesn't allow unsecure (sic? unencrypted?) VMs, which, ironically, are needed to run nested Linux.

Disclaimer, my memory on the exact terminology is extremely fuzzy. But pixels with tensor can run it just fine. And it's purely a software thing too, btw.

It should work fine for any Android phone with pKVM support. It runs Debian in a VM, with some kind of Wayland trick (using virgl for GPU acceleration) to get GUI support.

pKVM requires a) a compatible CPU (most CPUs will do, probably), b) compatible firmware/bootloader software, and c) a compatible Android build

The latter two parts are the most likely reason why not all phones have support for this.