Karim Yaghmour Presents Embedded Android #2 - Working with the AOSP

While Android has been created for mobile devices -- phones first and now tablets -- it can, nonetheless, be used as the basis of any touch-screen system, whether it be mobile or not. Essentially, Android is a custom-built embedded Linux distribution with a very elaborate and rich set of user-space abstractions, APIs, services and virtual machine. This four-part workshop is aimed at embedded developers wanting to build touch-based embedded systems using Android. It will cover Android from the ground up, enabling developers to get a firm hold on the components that make up Android and how they need to be adapted to an embedded system.

Specifically, Karim tarts by introducing Android's overall architecture and then proceeds to peel Android's layer one-by-one. First, he covers the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), the open source project under which Android's source code is released. He then digs into the native Android user-space, Android's power tools, and covers how hardware support is implemented in Android. Given that Android is built on top of Linux, he also goes over some embedded Linux tricks and sees how the kernel is modified to support the Android user-space. In addition, he looks at the System Server, the Android Framework and core Android applications, and how to customize them.

[charbax]

questions mic may be on for the speakers inside of the room, just not connected to my camera sorry.

[cbugk]

About CCASH (starts at 23:44), my gues regarding it causing build errors is the following. If a file is modified and is built on a branch yet its output file is not tracked by git, then upon switching to another branch the source file would be reverted and the output file would not. As far as the compiler is concerned the file is intact and can be shortcut, which would not cause an incompatibility if the change was an additional functionality for instance, but occasionally, stale output file could contradict what the source declares, thus a broken build even though source (tracked) files are the same. So occasional fresh builds overnight or some other means should catch such events before too deep into commit history.

[Zrzyck]

Thank you Charbax for sharing this video! It was very useful.

[deathvally]

4:40 "GigaByte of Sources, What do you do with that?" 😂
This guy is awesome.

[hlakdawala]

Where can I get the presentation slides used here?