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 analyzed the Android-x86 HAL and integrated it to x86vbox so that we are able to boot x86vbox over the next few chapters. We also analyzed the start-up process of Android-x86. We used the debug console in the first stage of the start-up process to analyze the kernel module loading process. Before we can actually boot the x86vbox on VirtualBox, one issue that we haven't resolved is which bootloader we should use. Unlike the emulator, it does not need a bootloader, since the emulator uses a built-in mini bootloader to load the kernel and ramdisk. VirtualBox is very similar to real hardware. We won't be able to boot up an operating system without a proper bootloader.

In the next chapter, we will discuss this issue and we will explain how we can resolve it using PXE boot supported by VirtualBox.