ANDROID OS

CSE120 (FA10)
Xiao Ma ([email protected])

WHY ANDROID?
the denition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/ manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

What does it mean to researchers? What does it mean to users?

OUTLINE
Android platform architecture OS kernel, libraries and devices Android programming model Delvik Virtual Machine Energy efciency How to write efcient code

FIRST THING FIRST

What is the difference between a mobile OS and a desktop/server OS?

ARCHITECTURE

ANDROID

ANDROID

ANDROID

BASED ON LINUX
Android uses Linux 2.6 kernel as the hardware abstraction What are the essences an OS should provide? Memory management, process management, IPC No virtual memory; specially implemented IPC Drivers and architecture support How to port Android to a new device? Using Linux vs. Writing a new OS from scratch Do all Linux kernel implementations work well on mobile devices?

APPLICATION LIBRARY
GNU libs (glibc) is too big and complicated for mobile phones, so Android implements its own special version of libc - Bionic libc: Smaller size - 200K (glibc is more than 400K) Strip out some complicated C++ features, the most signicant one - no C++ exception! Very special and small pthread implementation, heavily based on kernel futexes Bionic libc does not fully support POSIX and is not compatible with glibc which means ...?

PROCESS MANAGEMENT
Whats the difference between mobile apps cycle and desktop apps cycle? Two key principles Android usually do not kill an app, i.e. apps keep running even after you switch to other apps Android kills apps when the memory usage goes too high, but it saves app state for quick restart later on Do they make sense to mobile apps?

APPLICATION LIFE CYCLE

EXAMPLE
System
Home

Home

Home

At the Home screen

EXAMPLE
System
Home List

Home Mail

Home List

Start the Mail app and read the list

EXAMPLE
System
Home List Message

Home Mail

Home List Message

Click on one of the message and see its content

EXAMPLE
System
Home List Message Browser

Home Mail Browser

Home List Message Browser

Click a link in the message

EXAMPLE
System
Home List Message Browser

Home Browser

Home Browser

Now we have enough space to start the Map app

EXAMPLE
System
Home List Message Browser Map

Home Browser Map

Home Browser Map

Start the Map app

EXAMPLE
System
Home List Message Browser

Home Browser Map

Home Browser

Go back to the browser

EXAMPLE
System
Home List Message

Home Browser Mail

Home

List

Message

The Mail app is resumed and shows the previous message

EXAMPLE
System
Home List

Home Browser Mail

Home

List

Go back to the mail list

EXAMPLE
System
Home

Home Browser Mail

Home

Go back to the Home screen

DEBATE
Swapping model VS. Androids life-cycle model

DISK I/O
Flash Random access File fragment impact Total power Reliability Write longevity Capacity Price ~0.1ms No 1/2 to 1/3 of HDD Reliable
Limited number of writes

Hard Disk Drive 5-10ms Greatly impacted up to 15+ watts

Less of a problem 2-3TB $0.1-0.2 / GB

<= 512GB $1.5-2 / GB

LIMITED WRITES?
Flash drives have the well-known problem of limited number of writes in the life time - 10,000~100,000 times. Solution? What can applications do? How about operating system? Controllers? Hardware?

MEMORY MANAGEMENT
Linux kernel does most of the job Page-based memory management Virtual address to physical address mapping NO virtual memory
Why do we still need virtual to physical address mapping? Why does Android not support virtual memory?

POWER MANAGEMENT

DALVIK VM

Why does Android let developers use Java?

DALVIK VM
A special Java virtual machine (VM) designed to run with limited system resource Memory efciency Register machine vs. Stack machine (modern JVM) fewer instructions, faster execution why does the number of instructions matter? Running multiple VMs more efciently

DEX FILE
Java class les are converted into .dex les that Dalvik executes Java byte-code is converted into Dalvik byte-code during this process

MEMORY EFFICIENCY
Shared constant string pool Share clean (even some dirty) memory between processes as much as possible .dex les are mapped as read-only by mmap() Memory efcient JIT implementation JIT itself is about 100K Code cache and supporting data structure takes another 100K for each application

SHARED STRING POOL

SHARED STRING POOL

SHARED MEMORY

PROGRAMMING MODEL
Each application is running in its own process An application can have one or more components: activities, services, broadcast receivers and content providers A task (an application from users point of view) consists of several activities from one or multiple applications An application keeps running until the system kills it because of memory shortage

POWER SAVING

Picture is from Google I/O 09 talk - Coding for Life -- Battery Life, That Is

GZIP TEXT DATA

CHECK NETWORK TYPE

UPDATE BIN
Use setInexactRepeating() so the system can bin your update together with others

Picture is from Google I/O 09 talk - Coding for Life -- Battery Life, That Is

WORK OFFLOADING
Naive ofoading Speech-to-text, OCR More sophisticated ofoading - ne-grained ofoading MAUI: Making Smartphones Last Longer with Code Ofoad (MobiSys 10) Running two versions of the app on the mobile device and a powerful server Decide when/what to ofoad on the y

EFFICIENT CODE
for (int i = initializer; i >= 0; i--) int limit = calculate limit; for (int i = 0; i < limit; i++) Type[] array = get array; for (Type obj : array) for (int i = 0; i < array.length; i++) for (int i = 0; i < this.var; i++) Iterable<Type> list = get list; for (Type obj : list)

EFFICIENT CODE
Try to rest for the most of the time be nice to other processes Avoid allocation short-lived objects need to be garbaged collected long-lived objects take precious memory Make a method static if it does not access member variables Avoid internal getter/setters Use oating point numbers only when you have to Prefer int over enum Use static final for constants