Picking Apart Android's Engine

Harald Welte's blog recently had a span in the limelight thanks to a recent LWN article that highlighted the quote "Android is a screwed, hard-coded, non-portable abomination." The retorts are based on Matt Porter's "Android Mythbusters" presentation at Embedded Linux Conference Europe; Matt highlights features of Android that illustrate it's isolation from usual embedded Linux systems.

The presentation highlights not only the Linux kernel but other parts of the OS stack such as tools, common libraries, device initialization and SysV compliance. Both Matt, Welte and most commenters on LWN's article seem to forgo the familiar mantra that GNU is not Unix and discuss Linux in terms of both the kernel and a common software stack. Yet Google does not seem to be interested in the entire Linux environment but rather the core kernel itself. If you watch only the first minute of Google's Android Architecture Overview video you'll hear what Google is taking from Linux and why. It seems (and browsing through the source seems to confirm) that they're largely interested in the Linux kernel's driver modules and not the entire toolchain. Maybe for both for licensing and pragmatic reasons Google would rather forget about LSB compliance and SysV support; they just want a robust driver model with reasonable userspace security.

A site or forum other than LWN would take Welte's comments as kindling to a giant flame war. Instead (the vast majority of) LWN users offer insightful, more considered posts. Several commenters note that Google is avoiding the GPL whenever humanly possible, instead opting for a more permissive Apache Software License. Given how Android is intended to be re-used by OEMs as widely as possible this makes a good deal of sense, and may explain the avoidance of glibc. If we pare away the glibc and SysV arguments we still see a lot of hackish hacks in Android: hardcoded device policies, missing header files and broken unit tests. Hopefully this has been addressed in Android 2.0... the last tree I've gone through was after the 1.6 release.

Do these warts make Android prohibitive for developers? Not really. Bear in mind third-party development is meant to be confined to the Dalvik environment and Google's Android SDK. Native development is definitely allowed and enabled for Android, but 99.9% of all developers should be creating Java apps for the Dalvik VM. The VM sandbox should keep both users and developers safely away from any rough edges of the OS' internals. Still... Google often promotes the fact that each process runs in its own, isolated virtual machine as its own user. With so many Dalvik instances running at once, one would imagine that a little inter-process communication might go a long way.