Porting Android

Please note that this is not yet in a very usable state!
@ zenguz: The instructions from Casey from headlessandroid should work. Here is my kernel configuration:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2806139/kernel.14.img.config

How do you fix the colour screen while loading the kernel? What was the problem?

I have no clue. I extracted the .config from the Debian R-Pi kernel and enabled the needed android options from there.
I like your username btw

Please note that this is not yet in a very usable state!
@ zenguz: The instructions from Casey from headlessandroid should work. Here is my kernel configuration:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2806139/kernel.14.img.config

How do you fix the colour screen while loading the kernel? What was the problem?

I have no clue. I extracted the .config from the Debian R-Pi kernel and enabled the needed android options from there.
I like your username btw

From where you got the kernel source that you used? Please post the link
THanks.

System UI is crashing too

That happened on my ZTE blade about once or twice a day.
I installed go launcher ex and it suddenly stopped???

Probably a different cause here though, what worked for me almost certainly won't work on the pi.

System UI is crashing too

That happened on my ZTE blade about once or twice a day.
I installed go launcher ex and it suddenly stopped???

Probably a different cause here though, what worked for me almost certainly won't work on the pi.

The crashing is caused by the lack of gpu acceleration with the combination of ics
Were trying a gingerbread build now

Awesome news you guys! Making great headway here, just a few more steps till we have netflix on our pis!

Awesome news you guys! Making great headway here, just a few more steps till we have netflix on our pis!

doubt it, our build doesnt have drmserver

From where you got the kernel source that you used? Please post the link
THanks.

http://headlessandroid.blogspot.nl/2012 ... build.html

Waiting for my pi - awesome Android on it!

Hooray, I'm back.
So, from my quick skim over the posts, it looks to me like someone got it working. Well done to them!
Now, Im off to sleep for three days straight

Hi, did you ever try or get round to testing the GB build?

Could you link me to your current GB build and i'll see if i can contribute in anyway..
Unless some genius creates the drivers for ICS I think thats a dead horse.. no?

Hi, did you ever try or get round to testing the GB build?

Could you link me to your current GB build and i'll see if i can contribute in anyway..
Unless some genius creates the drivers for ICS I think thats a dead horse.. no?

ICS may not be as dead as it seems. There are patches that will remove the requirement for ICS to have hardware acceleration. That should fix the 'System UI has crashed' errors.
Besides, the 'drivers' for hardware acceleration are actually available, but they are linked against a more common C library called glibc. Android uses bionic libc, and thus can't make use of glibc-linked drivers. (note that the "drivers" I'm talking about are actually just the libraries for libEGL, libGLES, etc. available here)

But currently the bigger issue seems to be the frame buffer that's not playing nice with android. This is causing the flickering between the framebuffer console and Android itself, rendering everything unusable. SDL on android appears to have the same problem, only we can't simply turn off double buffering. We're not even entirely sure that the lack of double buffering is the problem.

We have set up a wiki page. You can find it here:
http://androidpi.wikia.com/wiki/Android_Pi_Wiki

thanks for the info.. I will add the irc tonight and have a flick through the wiki whilst at work.

See if i can't led a hand.

I don't know if any of the information in here may be useful?

http://hi.baidu.com/aokikyon/blog/item/ ... 18e01.html

I think someone with knowledge about framebuffers and/or android needs to have a look at this.

I think someone with knowledge about framebuffers and/or android needs to have a look at this.

i'd say take a try over @ xda's android chef central, there are power developers, probably there are some with the required knowledge

Does anyone have a working image to flash and play with yet??

Richard S.

Does anyone have a working image to flash and play with yet??

Richard S.

http://www.4shared.com/archive/rj4FZp9K ... getar.html

This is the closest you'll get to a working image for now. You may want to adjust some things in config.txt on the boot partition.

In in for info..

You should check out xda-deveopers.com and see if anyone there is willing to chip in. They know android like the back of their hands.

Did you try the disable CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE, mentioned on xda?

This will disable the console from the kernel being sent to the frame buffer. It may seem nothing is happening until the system boots..

Did you try the disable CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE, mentioned on xda?

This will disable the console from the kernel being sent to the frame buffer. It may seem nothing is happening until the system boots..

Yes, I have. Nothing comes up at all. System boots up, everything starts according to 'adb shell logcat', but no screen output.

I can't get to a PC right now, could you try this on the GB ROM?

Open
"include/linux/amba/clcd.h"

Find
"var->yres_virtual = var->yres = (var->yres + 1) & ~1;"

It is a wrong statement, because it reset the yres_virtual.

So the android framework will cause page flipping problem.

I insert "var->yres_virtual = var->yres *2; " in "clcd.h" to avoid the
problem occurring.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthr ... ?t=1039021
can it help you? it describes how to enable the boot console properly, it might help keeping it showing up only on boot time

anyway, do you have recovery mode? if so, what do you have? cwm or some else?

I see on the wiki that Android boots on the pi. I will be downloading and trying it out. I see there are two main issues and apparently two version being attempted (GB based and ICS based). Would it help if I try to recompile the libEGL library against bionic libc? I see it says it is an issue on the wiki. Has anyone tried?

Also, I see it mentions the CM7.2 is unusably slow. Is the reference kernel that this is based on the raspbian version? If not, mightn't the raspbian kernel offer some much need help via the armhf? I have raspbian running on my razpi and also my daughter's. I'll be sacrificing mine to make this Android on PI a reality. Once it is stable enough, I plan to install it on my daughter's.

Android automatically compiles libegl against bionic, but the default compiled version (libgles_android.so) provides software rendering as far as I understand it. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that we need hardware-specific libraries from here. They are closed-source, so you can't just recompile them against bionic. There are some *.a files, though.

We haven't tried compiling the kernel with hardfp, or the raspbian one. Might be worth a shot to to compile whole android with hardfp, although I doubt the performance gain will be that much. Most of the "slowness" I'm talking about is because all the load is on the puny little cpu (software rendering).

@fodi the framebuffer problem is gone with CM7.2. CM9/ICS still has the problem. I don't know how to code, so I don't think I'll be able to solve that. There's no recovery mode, we don't need one either.

@fodi the framebuffer problem is gone with CM7.2. CM9/ICS still has the problem. I don't know how to code, so I don't think I'll be able to solve that. There's no recovery mode, we don't need one either.

how did you solve it with cm7? (or was it automatically solved?)
i'd say a recovery mode would be useful for flashing zip files and therefore injecting components easily into /system (even if it can be reached only from terminal)