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.

Re:Android is designed to be lightweight

[Anonymous Coward]

Android does not run the Java Virtual Machine. It runs a totally different virtual machine - Dalvik. Yes, you use the Java programming language, but the bytecode is NOT Java. It's Dalvik.

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

[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.