Hello,

On Wednesday, February 8, 2012 1:05:58 AM UTC+1, Artemy Makarov wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> Well, you're pretty much covered most of my questions. 
> Now i have another two:
> 1) Are there any possibility, that Android will be easier to build for 
> particular new device? 
>

As long as you do not modify the framework the Android build system is 
already quite mature in being able to support many platform. The Linux 
kernel interfaces did not really changes between 2.x and 4.x and there are 
several directories in android (device and hardware ) and tricks (like 
overlays) that help keeping the customization separate but this all is not 
properly documented.


Some areas are "designed" to be reimplemented (hal layer , sensor layer, 
audio) but other areas are more complicated (audio and video codec 
support,3d)

I mean, there is probably way to unify drivers and those individual things, 
> that require most work, so vendor can compile drivers, custom apps, test 
> firmware and release it. As far as i see, currently this process is more 
> complicated.
>

In some situations the answer would be to add new kernel interfaces (for 
sensors, touch screen interfaces and virtual key stuff). The biggest 
problem IMHO is the lack of guidance/documentation on how to do this kind 
of stuff. I also believe the repo tool is not very helpful in this area.


2) Also, more practical question: 
> i have a device, based on Tegra 2 harmony board (with T20 CPU), which 
> support was discontinued by nVidia even before 2.3 was out. I have complete 
> source code of 2.2 for that device (working kernel, all drivers and 
> everything, so i can successfully build firmware), and I'm trying to use it 
> to port ICS to that device. Basically, now i'm stuck with new build system, 
> that requires tags for modules. I managed to overcome those problems, but i 
> decided to start over again to avoid mistakes. 
>

The approach I would recommend is to leave the kernel alone and just build 
a generic android 4.0 root file system. get this "working".
After that best is to use create a diff between "prestine" android 2.2 and 
your code and manually apply the changes to 4.0 in small incremental steps. 
I like using a tool call diffsplit to split the changes in smaller 
increments.

Using tools like meld or kdiff3 might help in doing 3-way merges.


> Maybe you or someone can point me at which things should i look at the 
> first place, where to pay attention (maybe there are some common points) or 
> even some theoretical information to read about this process further.
>

If you want to be able to maintain your work the first step is to properly 
mirror the android source code you might find some pointer on how to do 
this here.
https://github.com/keesj/gomo/wiki/AndroidRepoCheckout


but keep in min* IANAAD (I Am Not An Android Developer..)

Greetings
*** <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=IANAL>

>

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