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)

HAL of x86vbox

Before we create the new x86vbox device, we need to resolve a key issue: creating the HAL for x86vbox. What this means is that we need to support the hardware devices that appear on VirtualBox. As we said previously, the Android-x86 project is a project that aims to provide Board Support Package (BSP) for any x86-based computing devices. Even though VirtualBox is a virtualized x86 hardware environment, we can still use part of Android-x86 projects to support it. In the following table, we can see a list of projects that we reused from Android-x86. There are three project categories that we need to include in our build from Android-x86:

  • Linux kernel: Android-x86 provides a kernel that can work with Android for Intel x86 architecture.
  • HAL for Intel x86 architecture: Android-x86 includes HAL support on most devices that you can find on your PC.
  • Android system projects and framework projects: Android...