Android Architecture

9/16/15 -- Phil Lopreiato refreshed the talk and added some more in-depth information about the following:

• More details about ART (what gets compiled and how it works)
• Added information about what causes frame drops and how Choreographer works
• General presentation refresh

2/18/15 -- Phil Lopreiato gave a talk about some different levels of the Android software stack. We started from the bottom up and covered the following.

• Android app components and the Activity lifecycle
• Some of the modifications made to the Linux kernel and why they were done that way
• The Bionic C Library
• How the Dalvik VM works (and a comparison of stack-based and register-based VMs)
• Android's init system (Zygote) and how it gets forked (and found this in the source) to start new processes
• Benefits and drawbacks of JIT compilation, which brought us into a discussion of how ART worked
• Layers of Android security. Includes a discussion of Linux DAC policy (and how Android differs from common Linux systems) and how SELinux interacts with the system
• Discussed how Android can do IPC (Binders) and looked through the source to see how it was implemented

Slides and references for this talk can be found at the companion webpage