Talk Intermediate

Android Porting: techniques, tips and real world stories from porting A9 to A14

Rejected

Session Description

It’s a common task to port an existing Android BSP of a custom board or free ROM of a phone to a new Android version. Especially for devices that are already deployed in the field and should be supported with feature and security upgrades for a longer time.

In this talk, I want to present my learnings from porting Android on a custom board to a newer Android version. I will share my approach and helpful debugging techniques. We will look at using reference devices, other existing ports and how to dive deep into Android source code. I also cover AVB (Android Verified Boot) issues, proprietary HAL implementations debugging, kernel driver porting, device tree analysis and other topics based on real world examples. E.g., how to analyse issues based on available logs in logcat and dmesg.

Key Takeaways

Android and Linux debug tools, Issue triaging based on log messages and log diffing to reference devices, Tips for Android source code analysis, Basic binary blob reverse engineering, Divide and conquer debugging approach

References

https://cs.android.com/

https://source.android.com/

https://lineageos.org/

Session Categories

Engineering practice - productivity, debugging

Which track are you applying for?

Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Devroom

Speakers

Stefan Lengfeld

software engineer | inovex GmbH

Stefan Lengfeld has been an Embedded Linux and Embedded Android developer. He is a Linux kernel contributor and has been professionally involved in all topics related to embedded software development since 2015. Even before that, he dived into the depths of Linux and open source. But for the last few years, the Linux and Android graphics stack and performance and profiling has been his greatest passion.

Reviews

Very good topic. Would have made the cut but this is a 2nd submission by the presenter. We have already accepted one of his proposal. Given the limited number of time slots in devrooms, the reviewers have decided to accept only one submission per presenter to ensure fairness to all participants.

Reviewer #1 Rejected

Excellent topic, but have to reject due to 2nd submission from the presenter and limited slots.

Reviewer #2 Rejected