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)

Integrating VirtualBox Guest Additions

Up to now, we can boot x86vbox to Android. What we can do further is integrate VirtualBox Guest Additions to x86vbox.

VirtualBox is a virtualization environment. We can install a guest operating system as it is in VirtualBox. However, there are some limitations to working in this way. To run a guest operating system in a host environment, you may expect more things than just hardware virtualization. For example, you may find the mouse cursor to behave badly when you move between the host and guest system. You may want to share data between the hosts and guests easily, such as shared clipboard, shared folder, and so on. To meet these requirements, the host and guest need to know each other and have a way to talk to each other. In VirtualBox architecture, there is a component called Host-Guest Communication Manager (HGCM). On the host side, VirtualBox implements a service called...