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We found more references on the Volantis / Flounder device that is very likely the Nexus 8. The device will likely be officially announced during Google I/O 2014 held June the 25th and 26th but we found additional traces of the device in the Android source code.

The Android developers have been busy and given the fact that all previous information found on the Volantis / Flounder has been removed by Google means the company is serious to keep it secret. An entry in the source code reveals the same as a developer writes “This should not have gone into aosp (Android Open Source Project – red) external/{libpcap,tcpdump} have only been updated in klp-volantis-dev and downstream.”

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Another change to the source code reveals some internal annoyance about a new method to log items in Android, as an developer writes, “It will likely be removed post-Volantis release. It all stems from our ecosystem being cowardly comparatively. We have to support vendors that insist on deploying with the kernel logger, especially if they are retaining older kernels, do not want to disable the kernel logger for fear of change, and mixing them with later releases of the frameworks. The gTest I developed, I got pushback from test, security team and OEM-centric team members for making it an *error* that both loggers are deployed even though only one is being utilized. Apparently it is no ones responsibility to construct a CTS test that tells a vendor that they are being wasteful … I am braver than that, but I must listen to the voices from the team”

Another interesting entry confirms that the Flounder will be Tegra based. Although the change mentions 32-bit, another item mentions 64-bit. Given the incredible amount of effort Google appears to be making to add 64-bit support to Android, our best bet will be that Flounder will run on an upcoming 64-bit version of Android, using a 64-bit Nvidia Tegra ARM CPU which we discovered previously.

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