Book Image

Android System Programming

By : Roger Ye, Shen Liu
Book Image

Android System Programming

By: Roger Ye, Shen Liu

Overview of this book

Android system programming involves both hardware and software knowledge to work on system level programming. The developers need to use various techniques to debug the different components in the target devices. With all the challenges, you usually have a deep learning curve to master relevant knowledge in this area. This book will not only give you the key knowledge you need to understand Android system programming, but will also prepare you as you get hands-on with projects and gain debugging skills that you can use in your future projects. You will start by exploring the basic setup of AOSP, and building and testing an emulator image. In the first project, you will learn how to customize and extend the Android emulator. Then you’ll move on to the real challenge—building your own Android system on VirtualBox. You’ll see how to debug the init process, resolve the bootloader issue, and enable various hardware interfaces. When you have a complete system, you will learn how to patch and upgrade it through recovery. Throughout the book, you will get to know useful tips on how to integrate and reuse existing open source projects such as LineageOS (CyanogenMod), Android-x86, Xposed, and GApps in your own system.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Introduction to the Android graphics architecture

The graphics system in Android is similar to the architecture that we discussed in Chapter 3, Discovering Kernel, HAL, and Virtual Hardware. There we used goldfish lights HAL as an example to do a detailed analysis from the application level to the HAL and device driver layer. This analysis helps us to understand the Android architecture vertically.

However, the graphics system could be the most complicated system in the Android architecture. It would require another book to give a detailed introduction to the Android graphics system. The focus of this book is on how we can port Android systems to a new hardware platform. To focus on this goal, we will address the graphics HAL in this chapter instead of discussing the entire graphics system. The graphics system will work if we can choose the right graphics HAL and configure it right.

According to Google documents...