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 Your Own Device on VirtualBox

We have learned how to customize and enhance an existing device to support new features using x86emu. The x86emu device is a device created on top of the following Android emulators: goldfish and ranchu. From this chapter to Chapter 11, Enabling VirtualBox-Specific Hardware Interfaces, we will move to an advanced topic: porting Android systems. What can we do with a hardware platform that is not supported by AOSP?

In this chapter, we will move to a new device, x86vbox. We will create this new x86vbox device to run it on VirtualBox. Since VirtualBox is virtual hardware that is not supported by AOSP directly, we have to create the HAL layer by ourselves. Creating the HAL layer by ourselves doesn't mean we have to create everything from scratch. As I mentioned earlier, porting and customization are the art of integration. We can integrate device drivers for the devices that...