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 the PXE boot menu

When we have a real bootloader such as PXE Boot ROM, we have a way to support the boot path like a real Android device. As we know, Android devices can boot to three different modes--bootloader mode, recovery mode, and the normal start-up.

With PXE Boot ROM, we can easily support the same and more. By configuring the pxelinux.cfg/default file, we can allow x86vbox to boot in different paths. We will configure multiple boot paths here.

Booting to NFS installation

Since we cannot use AOSP image files to boot x86vbox directly, we need to install AOSP images to the VirtualBox hard disk. This is very similar to Android-x86. In Android-x86, we need to use a CDROM or USB stick to install the system so that we can boot Android after the installation...