Android without the mothership [LWN.net]

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 20, 2014 16:10 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Android without the mothership by mpr22
Parent article: Android without the mothership

If you want to develop for Android then you can do that on pretty lean system. If you want to build Android itself then you'll need 64bit linker and gigbytes of RAM (on my laptop with it's 16GB of RAM this feels somewhat painful since build process pushes everything else to swap, on my main development system with it's 64GB of RAM it works without pushing anything to swap; probably 8GB will be enough althugh I'm not too sure).

Still it should be possible to create SDK for Intel-based devies, but these are rare. And one could not create an SDK for ARM devices since there are no OpenSDK for ARM!

ARM64 version of OpenJDK, on the other hand, exist (recently RedHat released it) but then devices with ARM64 support are not yet here (but will be soon)!

This will give us two basic pieces needed for self-hosting, but there probably will be some other, less serious obstacles. As I've said: I expect to see self-hosted Android in 5-7 years, perhaps even 3 if we are lucky. And that will be a watershed moment because shortly after that traditional desktop Linux will become pointless. Clocks are ticking.

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Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 21, 2014 5:52 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (1 responses)

> And that will be a watershed moment because shortly after that traditional desktop Linux will

… just pick up whatever components are necessary to run Android apps, and then your Linux distro for your ARM/AArch64 desktop/notebook hardware will run Android apps alongside all the rest (just like running X apps / command-line apps / whatever else alongside Cocoa apps on Mac OS X). At that point, any difference between Android and "traditional desktop Linux" (except possibly for stuff related to the Google "mothership") will have effectively ceased to exist.

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 26, 2014 11:46 UTC (Thu) by accumulator (guest, #95885) [Link]

Interesting.. After years of divergence we enter into an era of convergence again. Linux Desktop as the "iron" and Android as the VM/Container