How to Develop and Port Android to a New Hardware Platform with Linaro

Zach Pfeffer, Linaro Android Working Group tech lead, gives an introduction to making Android work on a new hardware platform at Linaro Connect Q3.11 in Cambridge, August 2011.

He starts by giving details about Android, its implementation, and how source code is managed. He then gives details about how to add support for a new board, taking advantage of Linaro scripts and infrastructure, already supporting community boards from several ARM SoC vendors.

Here are the main topics covered during this 48 minutes presentation:

• General Android Overview (at 5:00 in the video) and different Android “components”:
  • The Linux kernel
  • Non-upstreamed kernel extensions
  • A set of shared and static libraries
  • A set of Hardware Abstraction Layers (HALs)
  • A JIT capable VM
  • Android activity framework
  • Android applications
• Repo, Gerrit and Git (25:50)
• Porting to a new Platform (35:07)
• HALs and Hardware Acceleration (39:00)
• Continuous Integration (41:02)
• Linaro Evaluation Build (LEB) Integration (45:06)

Slides can be found on the Linaro wiki at http://j.mp/p224Ie

Links to references used in the presentation:

• http://www.slideshare.net/jollen/android-os-porting-introduction
• http://elinux.org/Android_Kernel_Features
• http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.2-highlights.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APK_(file_format)
• https://sites.google.com/site/io/inside-the-android-application-framework
•  http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html
• http://source.android.com/source/life-of-a-patch.html

 

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