Android 4 Coming To the Raspberry Pi

SmartAboutThings writes "Raspberry Pi ... might be getting a functional Android port real soon. According to a post on their official blog, they have managed to port almost all the basic functions of Android 4.0 on Raspberry Pi, besides audio support. This comes after the Raspbian OS has been released for Raspberry Pi, and it promises to be 40% faster." For anyone hoping for source to the graphics accelerator, you're still out of luck: everything video related is still implemented using a blob.

Comments

Maybe not that lightweight

[Dr. Manhattan]

On the other hand, Android likes a bit more RAM than 256MB. My original Droid has 256MB of RAM, and had some issues with version 2.2 (Froyo). I had to do some fairly extensive tweaking to get acceptable performance with Cyanogenmod (2.3 Gingerbread). I'd be quite nervous to try to run ICS with that amount of RAM...

Re:Maybe not that lightweight

[Fallingcow]

It continues to amaze me that modern "light weight" operating systems are so much more resource hungry BeOS was, doing essentially the same tasks—especially since they get to offload so much basic UI work to the graphics chip!

My phone's much more powerful than my old Pentium 133Mhz machine w/ 64MB RAM (luxury, I know) was, yet BeOS on that clunker was 100x more responsive and less prone to weird UI bugs, brief hangs, and outright lockups than my Android phone. iOS is (a lot) better, but still very greedy and bloated by comparison.

Then again, it ran circles around its contemporaries in the desktop operating system arena (including Linux), so maybe it was just so good that it's asking too much to expect even a company with vast resources to write something comparably nimble and capable.

Re:Android is designed to be lightweight

[ShanghaiBill]

pretty much everything runs on freaking Java virtual machine. I do hope that Rasbperry Pi, however, is not trying to emulate that.

The Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF 700 MHz processor. The "J" in ARM1176JZF indicates that it includes the Jazelle hardware accelerator for Java. So it should be able to run Java very efficiently.

Re:Android is designed to be lightweight

[DrXym]

It doesn't use Java. It uses a register based virtual machine called Dalvik. It has been designed to be as lightweight as possible. The Android OS also uses a cut down user land and a cut down C runtime called BIONIC. It can run on low memory devices but I doubt Android 4.0 was ever envisaged to run on such a tight setup and I doubt the performance will be great.

Re:Android is designed to be lightweight

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what you're saying is that it's "write once, run anywhere but android"?

Java has never been that portable anyway. If you want to write code that you can run in virtual machines on pretty much any platform I would go for NES-compatible. There aren't many platforms out there without a NES emulator.

Re:Android is designed to be lightweight

[TheRaven64]

Jazelle is not publicly documented. The technology basically reserves a few registers for VM state and the rest for the stack of the current program. You use a special branch-to-Jazelle-mode instruction and then it starts executing Java bytecodes, trapping into the emulator for complex ones. There are two problems with this. The first is that the lack of documentation and the requirement to pay a patent license fee if you do use it even with the (expensive) documentation means that there is no open source implementation. The second is that it executes JVM bytecodes, not Dalvik ones.