termux/proot

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1121 stars · 266 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Termux's patched fork of PRoot, a user-space implementation of chroot, mount --bind, and binfmt_misc built on ptrace. It lets unprivileged users run arbitrary directory trees as a root filesystem, e.g. Linux distributions inside Termux on Android without rooting the device.

Use cases

• run a Linux distribution inside Termux without root
• use an arbitrary directory as a new root filesystem
• bind-mount files elsewhere in the filesystem hierarchy
• run programs built for another CPU architecture via QEMU user-mode
• fake root user id so package managers work in a chroot

When to choose

• you need a chroot-like environment on Android or without root privileges
• you want to run foreign-architecture binaries transparently through QEMU user-mode
• you are a Termux user installing Linux distros via proot-distro

When to avoid

• you need real privilege escalation or kernel/hardware access - PRoot only fakes root
• you need full virtualization or container isolation guarantees
• you need high performance for syscall-heavy workloads, since ptrace interception adds overhead

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

file-system security operating-systems developer-tools cli proot ptrace chroot termux user-space rootless qemu-user virtualization command-line linux android

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="termux/proot")