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)

Understanding build layers

The AOSP build system includes the abstraction layers to build a device. After we understand the ideas behind these layers, it will help us to understand the relationship of the various Makefiles for a device. It is always good to refer to the original Google document at the following URL, when you start to create a new device. The information will usually be updated when a new Android release is available: http://source.android.com/source/add-device.html.

In this section, we will apply the information from the previous Google document to the specific Android emulator virtual hardware that we are going to work on. In this way, we can derive all device-specific Makefiles according to the general guidance from the previous Google document. Throughout the process from generic to specific, we can apply the inheritance of object-oriented concepts to the Makefile system.

There are three layers...