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)

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced Native Bridge in Android architecture first so that we can understand how it works. Based on our understanding of Native Bridge, we extended the x86emu device with Houdini support. We changed the Makefiles of the x86emu device and we also utilized the open source project Android-x86 to save the effort of integration. After we integrated Houdini in x86emu, we tested two scenarios of Houdini use:

  • A standalone command-line application
  • An Android application with a native shared library built with JNI

In the next chapter, we will explore more about the x86emu start up process and we will learn how to debug the start up process using a customized ramdisk image.