Roger Ye - Embedded Programming with Android

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Bringing Up an Android
System from Scratch

Roger Ye

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ye, Roger, author.
Embedded programming with Android : bringing up an Android system from scratch /
Roger Ye.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-13-403000-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 0-13-403000-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Android (Electronic resource) 2. Embedded computer systemsProgramming.
3. Application softwareDevelopment. 4. Emulators (Computer programs)
5. SmartphonesProgramming. I. Title.
QA76.76.A65Y438 2016
004.167dc23
2015022900

Copyright 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, 200 Old Tappan Road, Old Tappan, New Jersey 07675, or you may fax your request to (201) 236-3290.

ARM is a trademark of ARM Ltd. Android, Google Play, Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. CodeBench is a trademark of Mentor Graphics. Ubuntu is a trademark of Canonical. CyanogenMod is a USPTO-registered trademark of CyanogenMod, LLC. Eclipse is a trademark of Eclipse Foundation.

ISBN-13: 978-0-13-403000-5
ISBN-10: 0-13-403000-1

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
First printing, August 2015

Editor-in-Chief
Mark L. Taub

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Laura Lewin

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Michael Thurston

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Zigurd Mednieks
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Zigurd Mednieks, Series Editor

The Android Deep Dive Series is for intermediate and expert developers who use Android Studio and Java, but do not have comprehensive knowledge of Android system-level programming or deep knowledge of Android APIs. Readers of this series want to bolster their knowledge of fundamentally important topics.

Each book in the series stands alone and provides expertise, idioms, frameworks, and engineering approaches. They provide in-depth information, correct patterns and idioms, and ways of avoiding bugs and other problems. The books also take advantage of new Android releases, and avoid deprecated parts of the APIs.

About the Series Editor

Zigurd Mednieks is a consultant to leading OEMs, enterprises, and entrepreneurial ventures creating Android-based systems and software. Previously he was chief architect at D2 Technologies, a voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology provider, and a founder of OpenMobile, an Android-compatibility technology company. At D2 he led engineering and product definition work for products that blended communication and social media in purpose-built embedded systems and on the Android platform. He is lead author of Programming Android and Enterprise Android.

To the programmers who have great interest in embedded systems
and the latest computing devices

Preface

Computing is becoming more and more pervasive. Computing devices are evolving from traditional desktop computers to tablets and mobile devices. With the newer platforms, embedded computing is playing a more important role than the traditional mainframe- and desktop-based computing. Embedded system programming looks very different in various usage scenarios. In some cases, it consists of application programming using the assembly and C languages on top of the hardware directly. In other cases, it takes place on top of a real-time operating system (RTOS). In the most complicated case, it can be a desktop-based system using a modern operating system such as Linux or Windows.

Due to the many different usage scenarios and hardware architectures that are possible, it is very difficult to teach embedded programming in a standard way in a school or university. There are simply too many hardware platforms based on a multitude of very different architectures. The processors or microprocessors can be as simple as 8-bit models or as complicated as 32-bit or even 64-bit devices. In most cases, students learn about embedded programming on a dedicated hardware reference board and use the compiler and debugger from a particular company. Obviously, this kind of development environment is unique and difficult to duplicate. To overcome these challenges, this book uses virtualization technology and open source tools to provide a development environment that any programmer can easily obtain from the Internet.