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)

Configuring and testing the PXE boot

We can create a virtual machine instance to test the environment. We will demonstrate this in the Ubuntu 14.04 environment. The same setup can be duplicated to the Windows or OS X environment as well.

Setting up the virtual machine

Let's create a virtual machine called pxeAndroid in VirtualBox first. After starting the VirtualBox, we can click the New button to create a new virtual machine, as shown in the following screenshot:

We call it pxeAndroid and choose Linux as the type of virtual machine. We can just follow the wizard to create this virtual machine with a suitable configuration. After the virtual machine is created, we need to make a few changes to the settings.

The first thing that needs to be changed is the network...