Table Of ContentAndroid System Programming
Porting, customizing, and debugging Android HAL
Roger Ye
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Android System Programming
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First published: May 2017
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Credits
Author Copy Editor
Roger Ye Safis Editing
Reviewers Project Coordinator
Bin Chen Ritika Manoj
Chih-Wei Huang
Shen Liu
Nanik Tolaram
Commissioning Editor Proofreader
Amarabha Banerjee Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Indexer
Shweta Pant Mariammal Chettiyar
Content Development Editor Production Coordinator
Arun Nadar Nilesh Mohite
Technical Editor
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About the Author
Roger Ye has worked in the area of embedded system programming for more than 10 years.
He has worked on system programming for mobile devices, home gateways, and
telecommunication systems for various companies, such as Motorola, Emerson, and Intersil.
Most recently, he has worked as an engineering manager, leading a team of Android
engineers to develop mobile security applications at Intel Security. With extensive
knowledge and experience in the areas of embedded systems and mobile device
development, he published a book called Embedded Programming with Android, Addison-
Wesley, in 2015.
I would like to thank my dearest wife, Bo Quan, and my lovely daughter, Yuxin Ye, for
enduring me to spend significant time on this book over the weekends. They have been very
encouraging and always give me support to work on the things that I am interested in.
About the Reviewers
Bin Chen is a senior engineer from Linaro. He has worked on various Android-based
products since 2010: TV, STB, Galaxy Tab, Nexus Player, and Google Project Ara, in that
order, and now AOSP 96Boards. He occasionally blogs and speaks about all things
Android. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
Chih-Wei Huang is a developer and promoter of free software who lives in Taiwan. He is
famous for his work in the VoIP and internationalization and localization fields in Greater
China.
Huang graduated from National Taiwan University (NTU) in 1993 with a bachelor's degree
in physics, and attained a master's degree in the electrical engineering department of NTU
in 2000. Huang currently works as a chief engineer of Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd.
for the OPENTHOS project. He is one of the founding members of the Software Liberty
Association of Taiwan (SLAT).
Chih-Wei Huang is the founder and coordinator of the Chinese Linux Documentation
Project (CLDP). He is also the second coordinator of the Chinese Linux Extensions (CLE)
and a core developer of GNU Gatekeeper (from 2001 to 2003).
He is a contributor to pyDict, OpenH323, Asterisk, GStreamer, and more. He is working on
a way to leverage the ASUS Eee PC with the power of the free software community and
aims to provide a complete solution for Android on the x86 platform. The Eee PC,
VirtualBox, and QEMU have been tested and are OK.
Chih-Wei Huang and Yi Sun started the Android-x86 open source project in 2009. The
project aims to bring Android to the x86 platform.
About the Reviewers
Shen Liu is a senior engineer, working at Intel China. He used to work at McAfee LLC,
Broadcom Corporation, and Huawei Technologies. He has over 10 years of work experience
on Linux/Android and embedded systems, in different roles. He had taken manager,
architect, and engineer roles during his career. He is mainly responsible for the Android
framework, but is not limited to it, and he has a lot of passion for software design. On top of
that, he loves reading technical books.
Nanik Tolaram works as a senior Android platform engineer for BlocksGlobal in Australia,
where he is responsible for developing Screener (screener.digital) and Lumin
(mylumin.org). He is passionate about Android and is very active within both the local and
international Android developer communities--from talks and teaching to writing articles
for ODROID open source magazine (magazine.odroid.com). In his spare time, he loves to
tinker with electronics and study human psychology and behavior. He lives in Sydney,
Australia, with his lovely wife and two beautiful boys.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1
Chapter 1: Introduction to Android System Programming
9
What is system programming? 10
What is the scope of this book? 11
Overview of the Android system 13
Kernel 13
HAL 15
Android system services 15
Binder IPC 16
Application framework 16
Recovery 17
The third-party open source projects derived from AOSP 19
LineageOS (CyanogenMod) 19
Android-x86 21
CWM/CMR/TWRP 22
Strategy of integration 23
Virtual hardware reference platforms 24
Introduction to the x86-based Android emulator 24
Introduction to ranchu 25
VirtualBox-based Android emulators 26
Summary 27
Chapter 2: Setting Up the Development Environment
28
Summary of Android versions 28
Installing Android SDK and setting up an Android Virtual Device 31
Creating AVD in an older version of SDK 31
Creating AVD in the latest version of SDK 33
Testing the goldfish emulator 34
Testing ranchu emulator 37
The AOSP build environment and the Android emulator build 39
The AOSP build environment 39
Installing the required packages 39
Installing Open JDK 7 and 8 39
Downloading the AOSP source 41
Installing repo 41
