Update: Brillo was abandoned by Google in December 2016 in favour of Android Things
Brillo (https://developers.google.com/brillo/) is Google's operating system for devices that are connected to the IoT. They communicate with each other, with the cloud and with mobile apps using a system called Weave (https://developers.google.com/weave/). Brillo and Weave are still under wraps: you have to request an invite from the two links in order to get access to documentation, sample code, and so on. However, there is enough information publicly available to build and test a device running Brillo, which is what this blog is about. I hope to cover Weave in a later post.
Brillo is actually a cut-down version of Android. Basically, all the Java components have been stripped away leaving a much simpler embedded Linux operating system. When building Brillo, some things pop out immediately, which may give a preview of future Android builds:
Below, I show how to build and run the Brillo emulator
This is basically the same as building Android from AOSP: the instructions are here http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html. I used a fairly old octocore AMD machine with 16 GiB RAM running Ubuntu 14.04.4 64-bit desktop. Note that although Brillo targets do not contain any Java code, the build fails at the very beginning if you don't have OpenJDK 1.7 installed.
The Brillo code was pushed to AOSP in November 2015. I will start by syncing the master branch:
$ repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/brillo/manifest
$ repo sync
Allow a while for that to complete because it has 34 GiB to download.
The procedure is basically the same as for any AOSP build:
$ . build/envsetup.sh
$ lunch
Select brilloemulator_x86-eng (or, run lunch brilloemulator_x86-eng). Then build it using make, giving the number of CPU cores on the build machine as the -j parameter:
$ make -j8
The first thing you notice is this:
Running kati to generate build-brilloemulator_x86.ninja...
Kati is a GNU make clone which converts the many thousands of makefile snippets in an Android build into a single, huge, ninja file:
$ ls -lh out/build-brilloemulator_x86.ninja
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chris chris 145M Mar 21 15:27 out/build-brilloemulator_x86.ninja
The main goal, apparently, is to speed-up incremental build of Android. There is some info in the README.md file at https://github.com/google/kati. To speed up incremental builds, and make them more robust, kati writes the timestamps of all the files and directories to a file, so that it only has to re-read the makefiles if something has changed:
$ ls -lh out/.kati_stamp-brilloemulator_x86
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chris chris 12M Mar 21 15:27 out/.kati_stamp-brilloemulator_x86
The ninja file is processed by Ninja, which is a simple build system that builds according to the rules in the input file. See https://ninja-build.org/
One nice touch is that when the build gets going, you see a nice progress indicator:
[ 44% 7550/16800] target ..........................
Towards the end, it builds a kernel:
[ 95% 15960/16800] Building i386 4.4 kernel...
This is a big deal. This step is optional, in that you can set up the device build files to copy a prebuilt kernel binary as with “old” AOSP builds, but the clear intention is that the kernel source is part of the archive. In hardware/bsp/kernel there are kernels for freescale, imagination, intel, marvell qcom, and rockchip. I just can't exaggerate how pleased I am about this.
Finally, you should see this message :
#### make completed successfully (34:37 (mm:ss)) ####
The build time is quite a lot shorter than for contemporary Android builds, mostly because there is less to build, but also because of the new build system.
The emulator a version of QEMU. You start it like this (assuming that you have previously sourced build/envsetup.sh and selected the target via the lunch command):
$ brilloemulator-x86
Before I go on, note that quitting the emulator is, maybe, not obvious. Remember that it is just a copy of QEMU that was started without a graphics screen (-nographic). So, to quit you type Ctrl-A X. That is, you press the Ctrl and A keys together, let go, and then press the X key, and you will see:
QEMU: Terminated
Using Brillo at the command line feels much more Linux-y than earlier versions of Android, courtesy of Toybox (http://www.landley.net/toybox/). Toybox largely replaces the earlier command line tool called Toolbox. Now, commands such as “find”, “which”, and “uname” all work as on regular Linux. Even “ifconfig” works as it should, replacing the oddly crippled version in Toolbox. The shell is still the BSD Korn shell, but a later version. Both adb and logcat work as expected.
The basic directory layout is the same as Android: the init program and init*.rc scripts are in the root, which is an initramfs (ramdisk). The main system files are stored in the read-only system directory, which is much cut-down from Android:
# ls -p /system
bin/ build.prop etc/ lib/ usr/ xbin/
Run-time data storage is in /data, as normal. In here you find:
# ls -p /data
adb/ app-private/ data/ mediadrm/ resource-cache/
anr/ backup/ drm/ misc/ ss/
app/ bootchart/ local/ nativebenchmark/ system/
app-asec/ bugreports lost+found/ nativetest/ tombstones/
app-lib/ dalvik-cache/ media/ property/ user/
There are some Dalvik related directories which I take to be atavistic vestiges from Android, but I could be missing something here, who knows?
Finally, this is the list of processes (with kernel threads removed for brevity):
# ps
USER PID PPID VSIZE RSS WCHAN PC NAME
root 1 0 7820 1820 0 08143195 S /init
[...]
root 981 1 3548 1476 0 0812f640 S /sbin/ueventd
[...]
logd 1254 1 12304 2972 0 b75b1df1 S /system/bin/logd
dbus 1257 1 6124 3204 0 b738fbd0 S /system/bin/dbus-daemon
system 1258 1 6400 2024 0 b755bad6 S /system/bin/servicemanager
shell 1261 1 4864 1720 0 b74bcdf1 S /system/bin/sh
root 1262 1 7548 1024 0 0811d050 S /sbin/adbd
keystore 1264 1 9384 4164 0 b714aad6 S /system/bin/keystore
media 1265 1 32144 11788 0 b70d9ad6 S /system/bin/mediaserver
system 1266 1 9104 4084 0 b730b8d5 S /system/bin/nativepowerman
root 1267 1 9208 3860 0 b75498d5 S /system/bin/peripheralman
root 1268 1 11280 4236 0 b7325ad6 S /system/bin/sensorservice
wifi 1269 1 10900 4380 0 b7347c55 S /system/bin/wpa_supplicant
audioserver 1270 1 18608 8568 0 b6af28d5 S /system/bin/brilloaudioservice
root 1272 1 4864 2432 0 b744fc55 S /system/bin/sh
metrics_coll 1273 1 11840 5772 0 b70ff8d5 S /system/bin/metrics_collector
metricsd 1274 1 12804 5808 0 b74ec8d5 S /system/bin/metricsd
root 1275 1 5408 1828 0 b74d9da1 S /system/xbin/perfprofd
trunks 1277 1 13268 5112 0 b70938d5 S /system/bin/trunksd
root 1278 1 15048 7852 0 b71f58d5 S /system/bin/update_engine
webserv 1280 1 12848 6968 0 b71bf8d5 S /system/bin/webservd
root 1300 1 13640 8760 0 b72c18d5 S /system/bin/shill
firewall 1328 1 10524 6628 0 b73aa8d5 S /system/bin/firewalld
dhcp 1340 1300 6208 1900 0 b75c58d5 S /system/bin/dhcpcd-6.8.2
system 1342 1 6408 2100 0 b7353bd0 S avahi-daemon: running [linux.local]
tlsdate 1343 1 6836 3584 0 b72b98d5 S /system/bin/tlsdated
system 1344 1 16740 8888 0 b6e9b8d5 S /system/bin/weaved
root 1345 1343 6708 368 0 b72bafa6 S /system/bin/tlsdated
system 1347 1300 5172 1756 0 b7572c55 S /system/bin/dnsmasq
root 1352 1261 4864 2476 0 b7580df1 S /system/bin/sh
root 1370 1352 6208 2268 0 b7538fa6 R ps
Among the daemons you can see running, many are to do with network connectivity: wpa_supplicant, shill, firewalld, dhcpcd-6.8.2, avahi-daemon and dnsmasq. Then there is the Weave protocol manager, weaved, and a web server, webservd. Some components are obviously using binder to communicate: servicemanager and sensorservice, for example. And there is dbus-daemon...
Plainly there is still a lot to learn here. I will be following up with more blogs as time goes by.