CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-source
user852298
user852298

Reputation: 67

Android Kernel modifying

I'm a Android application developer. For some reasons, I should change the Android kernel a bit. But I don't know anything about kernel. I will be appreciated if someone introduce me a website who explain android kernel modules and other info about it.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 10615

Answers (1)

Hussain
Hussain

Reputation: 5562

In the standard Android open source distribution the kernel is distributed as a pre-built binary in the mydroid/prebuilt/android-arm/kernel folder and the source code is not included. The kernel source was removed from the default manifest for two reasons as I take it. One is that it takes a lot of bandwith and diskspace for a platform component that most people will not work with much. The other reason is that since the kernel is built with the kernel build system and not as part of the aosp build system it makes sense to keep it separated. The common branch for the kernel is the one used by the emulator. There are also branches for experimental, msm (Qualcomm platforms) and Omap (TI platform) and maybe some more. If you want to use the Android kernel with hardware these may be more interesting to you.

  • Get the Android kernel either by adding it to your repo manifest or manually by running: git clone git://android.git.kernel.org/kernel/common.git

  • The kernel built this way should end up in the arch/arm/boot folder of your kernel tree (where you put the code from git clone)

  • Note that I have used the default paths in the above description, you need to change them to what applies to your setup. It has been a some time since last time I tested this but I think it should work.

Go through the following sites which will also give u some ideas.

Android Porting, Android Platform, Android-Pdk,

Android porting in real target, Build-compile-linux-kernel-android

I guess that since you are talking about kernel programming you are also looking for ways to hook up new hardware with the platform and expose that functionality using your framework extensions to the applications. Hardware is basically added as a standard Linux driver so getting it to work under Linux is a good first step. How to hook it into the Android framework after that depends on what type of hardware it is. You could either use a native process to control it (compare the camera service or radio daemon in the current platform) or just spawn a thread in the application that uses your framework extension. For hardware that does not require that much attention plugging it in using an Android HAL library could also be an option

Upvotes: 11

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