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)

Creating a new x86vbox device

Once we have the HAL for VirtualBox, we can create a new device named x86vbox now. If we review how we created the x86emu device in Chapter 4, Customizing the Android Emulator, we know that we need to have a board/device configuration Makefile and a product definition Makefile for a new device. We can also create a new device by inheriting it from an existing device. If we look at the preceding table of x86 HAL, we can see that there is a common x86 device project, device/common, which can be found in Android-x86. We will create our new device x86vbox by inheriting from this common device for x86. The x86vbox that we create in this chapter is a 32-bit x86 device. You can follow the same instructions to create an x86_64 device by yourself.

As we did in Chapter 4, Customizing the Android Emulator, we create an AndroidProducts.mk Makefile to include the product definition Makefile for...