What is missing in Maemo (except Dalvik VM), that could run programs designed for the Android OS on N900. If anything, do you copy the files from e.g. Motorola Droid to run android programs on N900?

I would have thought that Dalvik was a major stumbling block!

But what else...?

The VM is pretty much it. From my understanding the major benefit of java is that it will run on any hardware that the VM supports regardless of architecture. So if the VM could be made to work, we could run Android apps in that layer. The hard (impossible?) part is getting the VM to run.

IMHO running Dalvik on N900 would be damn slow. All regarding graphics in dalvik should be ported to use a X11 toolkit. That's obviously for simple apps. You need to port internet stack(integrate managers), telephone stack and PIM stuff....

Runnning Dalvik on top of Maemo/Meego would definately be slower. My understanding is that the android devices, use a specialized Linux kernel that provides just enough environment to run the VM, and everything else, including the GUI runs on top of that. I could forsee something like Ubuntu's ill-fated Android execution environment being effective though.

As former android user i can add that android phones (G1 for sure) have some hardware support for dalvik

What we need (for optimized Dalvik VM from Moto Droid)? Special kernel or special modules only. Droid' s hardware = N900 hardware. Android kernel is linux. So, drivers for Droid maybe usable in Maemo.

Maybe Dalvik VM binding as binformat (like normal Java VM). Add some modules and run android apps.

dalvik REQUIRES specific kernel modules and additions in order to work. it cant just be bolted onto a different os - and its also built using android non standard libc library so wouldn work without major hacking on another libc

It was discussed before.
See my answer here: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...8&postcount=24

Google is working hard to design Android the way they can keep total control over the platform.