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)

The Android-x86 start up process

In Chapter 1, Introduction to Android System Programming, we introduced the Android-x86 project, which is an open source project to provide the Android Board Support Package (BSP) for Intel devices. It uses an approach similar to Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions for desktops by using universal media to boot all kinds of Intel devices.

In order to achieve the goal of using one medium to boot all devices, it splits the boot sequence into two stages. The first stage is to boot a minimum embedded Linux environment to enable hardware devices. In the second stage, it switches to the Android system through chroot or switch_root. The second stage of the boot process is the same as we discussed previously. Let's look at the first stage of the Android-x86 boot process in detail. We will reuse it for the Android emulator in this chapter. This approach can help to simplify the start...