Android NDK ChangeLog:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-r5
IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:
- Allow dlclose() to properly call static C++ destructors when unloading
a shared library. This requires changes in both the C library and the
build system. IMPORTANT: This feature is only available for API level 9.
- Fix packaging error for system libraries of level 5 and 8. The libraries
bundled with the NDK and used at link time were not the correct version,
and this prevented linking against certain symbols appropriately.
- ndk-gdb: do not start activity unless --start or --launch is used.
(the documentation was correct, the implementation wrong)
- The system headers for all API levels have been cleaned up and will
not provide the declarations of functions that are not available in
the corresponding system libraries.
IMPORTANT CHANGES:
- Support for API level 9, (a.k.a. Android 2.3) which adds the following
native features to the platform:
- Native audio API through the OpenSL ES Standard.
New headers <SLES/OpenSLES.h> and <SLES/OpenSLES_Android.h>
are provided to allow applications targetting this API level to perform
low-latency audio input, output and processing directly from native
code.
- Native activity support, i.e. the ability to build applications that
are coded entirely in C or C++. More precisely, such applications still
run inside a VM, and will have to access most of the platform's features
using JNI (i.e. native code calling VM methods). However, this also
comes with a series of headers and libraries to implement the following
directly from native code:
- activity lifecycle management.
- user input handling (touch, keyboard, trackball, ...).
- window management (including accessing the pixel buffer).
- sensor listeners (e.g. accelerometer, compass, ...).
- hardware configuration management.
- easily reading assets out of an APK from native code.
- access to the storage manager, a new feature of Android X.X
that allows one to provide Opaque Binary Objects containing
large amounts of data outside of the APK.
See the documentation in docs/STABLE-APIS.html for more details.
Note that most of these new features are targetted at game developers.
- Improved gdbserver binary to allow debugging _threaded_ programs properly
with ndk-gdb (the previous binary could only set breakpoints on the main
thread).
IMPORTANT: THIS ONLY WORKS IF YOU RUN ON ANDROID 2.3 OR HIGHER.
The root cause of the problem is a platform bug that was only fixed in
2.3. If you try to debug on a previous platform, the gdbserver binary
will only be able to set breakpoints on the main thread.
For more information, see the specific section in docs/NDK-GDB.html.
- Easier debuggable builds: just invoke ndk-build while defining the
NDK_DEBUG variable to 1, as in:
$NDK/ndk-build NDK_DEBUG=1
This will have the same result that setting the android:debuggable="true"
in the <application> element of your AndroidManifest.xml file. See the
file docs/NDK-BUILD.html for more details.
Note that you will need to use the SDKr8 build tools to use this feature
properly!
- Refresh of system C++ headers:
- Headers have been moved out of the platform directory hierarchy.
This is to prevent conflicts with other STLs like STLport or the
GNU libstdc++ which provide their own version of the headers, but
does not affect your builds.
- The list of headers has grown to include the following:
cassert, cctype, cerrno, cfloat, climits, cmath,
csetjmp, csignal, cstddef, cstdint, cstdio, cstdlib,
cstring, ctime, cwchar, new, typeinfo, utility
Note that they still correspond to our minimal C++ runtime, no new feature
was introduced here.
- Support for C++ exceptions and RTTI. See docs/CPLUSPLUS-SUPPORT.html for
all details (and limitations).
- STLport implementation: Add sources and prebuilt binaries for a port of
the STLport C++ Standard Library (www.stlport.org), and an easy way to use
it at build time by defining APP_STL in your Application.mk. See
docs/APPLICATION-MK.html and docs/CPLUSPLUS-SUPPORT.html for all details.
- GNU libstdc++ implementation: Available as a static library that you can
select for your application through APP_STL. See docs/CPLUSPLUS-SUPPORT.html
for all details.
- Add support for prebuilt libraries with the PREBUILT_SHARED_LIBRARY and
PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARIES build scripts. See the new documentation
file named docs/PREBUILTS.html for explanations and usage examples.
- Support for module exports: A module can now define a set of compiler or
linker flags that will be automatically 'imported' by any other module that
depends on it, through LOCAL_STATIC_LIBRARIES or LOCAL_SHARED_LIBRARIES.
This is achieved with the help of new Android.mk variables named
LOCAL_EXPORT_CFLAGS, LOCAL_EXPORT_CPPFLAGS, LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES and
LOCAL_EXPORT_LDLIBS. See docs/ANDROID-MK.html for mode documentation, and
a 'samples/module-exports' for a sample project that uses this.
- Add support to specify a different file name for generated files, through
the new LOCAL_MODULE_FILENAME variable. See docs/ANDROID-MK.html for an
example.
- Add support for module imports, through the NDK_MODULE_PATH environment
variable and the new 'import-module' function. This allows you to avoid
hard-coding the path of third-party modules into your project files.
See docs/IMPORT-MODULE.html for details.
- Add the content of LOCAL_C_INCLUDES to gdb.setup to make native debugging
easier. Also fixes an issue that prevented clean parallel builds of
debuggable applications to work correctly. This fixes an error message that
said:
/bin/sh: <project>/libs/armeabi/gdb.setup: No such file or directory
When doing a "ndk-build -j<number>", with <number> bigger than 1.
- Add support for assembly-level source filtering. See the description of
LOCAL_FILTER_ASM in docs/ANDROID-MK.html for more details. This can be useful
for certain kinds of obfuscation tasks.
- This NDK comes with a new toolchain (named arm-linux-androideabi-4.4.3)
which provides many benefits, including:
- Better code generation than the previous one (gcc-4.4.0)
- On Windows, the binaries do not depend on Cygwin anymore.
- The ability to use it as a stand-alone cross-compiler
(see docs/STANDALONE-TOOLCHAIN.html for all details).
The binaries for gcc-4.4.0 are still provided for backwards compatibility.
Use NDK_TOOLCHAIN=arm-eabi-4.4.0 in your environment to force its usage.
Note that it is now deprecated and will be removed in a future NDK release.
IMPORTANT: The old toolchain doesn't properly support exceptions, RTTI,
STLport and GNU libstdc++.
The binaries for the already-deprecated gcc-4.2.1 have been removed.
- The 'cpufeatures' library has been updated to provide better architecture
and features detection (including a work-around for buggy ARMv6 kernels
which report an architecture version of 7).
The library is now also available as an import module, to simplify its
usage in your build scripts. See the updated docs/CPU-FEATURES.html file
for details.
NOTE: Please update your Android.mk to use module imports as soon as
possible. The location $NDK/source/cpufeatures/ is deprecated
and will be removed in a future NDK release. Avoid referencing
it directly in your build scritps!
OTHER FIXES AND CHANGES:
- Reduced the size of generated binaries by using --strip-unneeded
instead of --strip-debug. This gets rid of mor symbol table entries
in release shared libraries and executables, without impacting
runtime execution.
- Fix bad automatic dependency tracking when using multiple source
sub-directories.
- The path to system headers is now included last in the compilation command
line. This prevents conflicts with source code that define their own headers
with similar names (e.g. a custom "err.h" was ignored, because the system
<err.h> was used instead).
- Update documentation for 'my-dir' function to explain that, due to the
way GNU Make works, it really returns the path of the last included
Makefile (instead of the current one). Also provide examples on how
to deal with it.
- make-release.sh: Now has an --out-dir=<path> option to specify the
output directory where the packages are going to be copied. Also
ensure that generated packages have go+r permissions.
- ndk-build will now properly escape arguments. This means that something
like this:
ndk-build MY_CFLAGS="-DFOO -DBAR"
will now work correctly.
- Add --git-http option to download-toolchain-sources.sh and
rebuild-all-prebuilt.sh in order to download sources from
android.git.kernel.org through HTTP.
- ndk-gdb: properly launch activities for which name does not contain any dot.
- ndk-gdb: add --delay=<timeout> option to specify a delay in seconds
between activity launch and gdbserver attach. This is needed because certain
activities can take a long time to properly launch. The default delay is
also increased to 2 seconds (instead of 1).
- build/tools/build-gcc.sh: copy the sysroot to the build directory. This
avoids the generated toolchain binaries from hard-coding host build paths.
- Platform files are now under $NDK/platforms instead of $NDK/build/platforms
- Toolchain files are now under $NDK/toolchains instead of
$NDK/build/toolchains and $NDK/build/prebuilt.
- Release and debug objects are stored under two different directories now
(i.e. obj/local/<abi>/objs and obj/local/<abi>/objs-debug). This
prevents rebuilding *everything* when you switch between these two modes,
which can be a real time-saver for complex projects.
- Fixed a bug that duplicated the LOCAL_LDFLAGS in the final link command
when LOCAL_ALLOW_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS was not set to 'true'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-r4b
This release fixes a few bugs in r4 scripts. There are no new features.
OTHER FIXES & CHANGES:
- build/tools/rebuild-all-prebuilt.sh: mktemp expects 'XXXXXX' instead of 'XXX'.
Fix the script (and others in the same directory) to do that properly.
- ndk-gdb: check the target device's API level, and dump an error message if
it is not at least 8 (Android 2.2 a.k.a. Froyo). Fix script to properly
remove control characters like '\r' from adb shell's output. Also fix
script to work properly with OS X's BSD awk.
- ndk-build: Make AndroidManifest.xml optional. Now the build scripts will try
to look for jni/Android.mk if no manifest is found. If you don't use this,
you can also define NDK_PROJECT_PATH to point to your tree.
Also, on Windows, check that a Cygwin-compatible make executable is being
used, and dump a readable help message to solve the issue if this is not
the case.
- Place generated binaries under $PROJECT_PATH/obj/ instead of
$PROJECT_PATH/bin/ndk/. The 'bin' directory is sometimes cleaned
by the JDT, resulting in the inability to properly load symbol versions
of the shared libraries when running ndk-gdb.
- Warn when sources with unsupported extensions are used in LOCAL_SRC_FILES.
Previous behaviour was to silently ignore them.
- Set the optimization mode to 'debug' automatically if the manifest sets
android:debuggable to 'true'. You can override this by using
'APP_OPTIM := release' in your Application.mk, or by adding '-O2' to
your LOCAL_CFLAGS.
Note that even in release mode, the NDK build scripts will produce
binaries with symbols under obj/local/<abi>/ that will be used for
debugging with gdb. However, the debugger will have a harder time to
print proper local variable values that have been optimized out or
even set breakpoints properly.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-r4
IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:
- The <fenv.h> header was not placed in the correct location and could not
be found by normal builds.
IMPORTANT CHANGES:
- On Windows, Cygwin 1.7 or higher is now required. The NDK will not
work properly with Cygwin 1.5 which is now officially obsolete
anyway.
- Simplified build system: You no longer need to run build/host-setup.sh
or modify anything under $NDK_ROOT/apps/. Instead, just invoke the
new 'ndk-build' script from your application's project directory, or
one of its sub-directories.
See docs/OVERVIEW.html and docs/NDK-BUILD.html for more details.
NOTE: For compatibility purpose, you can still define projects
through $NDK_ROOT/apps/<name> though.
However, not that sample applications have moved from
'apps/<name>/project' to 'samples/<name>' and now must
be built with 'ndk-build'. The source code of pre-existing
samples didn't change though.
- Easy native debugging support when running debuggable applications
on Android 2.2 or higher, through the new 'ndk-gdb' helper script.
See docs/NDK-GDB.html for details.
- Support for hardware FPU. This is through the new 'armeabi-v7a' ABI
corresponding to ARMv7-a class devices.
Note that by default, the NDK will still generate machine code for the old
'armeabi' ABI (ARMv5TE based) which is supported by all official Android
system images to date.
You will need to define APP_ABI in your Application.mk file to change this.
See docs/APPLICATION-MK.html
More details about ABIs is now available in docs/CPU-ARCH-ABIS.html
- A small static library named 'cpufeatures' is provided with source code
and can be used at runtime to determine the CPU features supported by the
target device. It should run on all Android platforms, starting from 1.5.
For more information, see docs/CPU-FEATURES.html
- Support for the optional ARM Advanced SIMD (a.k.a. NEON) instruction set
extension through the use the LOCAL_ARM_NEON variable in Android.mk, or
the '.neon' suffix when listing source files.
Neon is an *optional* instruction set extension, and not all Android ARMv7
devices will support it. You will need to use the 'cpufeatures' library to
determine if such code can be used at runtime, and provide alternate code
paths if this is not the case. This is similar to MMX/SSE/3DNow on x86
platforms.
For more information, see docs/CPU-ARM-NEON.html
- Added a new sample (hello-neon) to demonstrate usage of 'cpufeatures'
and NEON intrinsics and build support.
- Added <android/bitmap.h>, a new stable API available from android-8
(a.k.a. Android 2.2) to reliably access the pixel buffer of an
android.graphics.Bitmap object from native code. See docs/STABLE-API.html
and the new sample program under 'samples/bitmap-plasma' for details
and usage example.
- Support the NX (No Execute) security feature, where special sections
are added to the generated shared libraries to instruct the kernel
that code shall not be executed from the heap and stack by default.
See docs/ANDROID-MK.html to see how to disable this, plus reference
links for more information.
OTHER FIXES AND CHANGES:
- support the .s extension for raw assembly sources (.S is already supported
but the input files are parsed by the C-preprocessor before being sent to
the assembler).
- build/host-setup.sh has been removed. There is no need for a 'setup' step
when using the NDK for the first time. All host-specific autodetection and
basic tool sanity checking have been moved to the build scripts themselves.
- APP_MODULES in Application.mk is now optional. If not defined, the NDK
will simply build _all_ the modules that are declared from your Android.mk.
You can still use APP_MODULES to restrict the set of modules you want to
build. Note that the NDK now computes the transitive dependencies of these
modules for you now. See docs/APPLICATION-MK.html for details.
- docs/STABLE-APIS.html: Add missing section for Dynamic Linker Library
(libdl.so). It is actually supported by all API levels.
- build/tools/download-toolchain-sources.sh: Use 'master' branch by default
instead of the 'eclair' one.
- build-toolchain.sh: Allow ad-hoc patching of toolchain sources when rebuilding
them. This is primarily to ease development. All you need to do is put a patch
under build/tools/toolchain-patches/<foo>/<name>.patch, and it will be applied
with 'patch -p1' into the <foo> directory of the unpacked toolchain sources
before the configure step.
- docs/CPU-ARCH-ABIS.html: Mention the experimental 'x86' ABI.
- build/core/mkdeps.sh: Removed obsolete script.
- the NDK build script now only parses the Application.mk and Android.mk of
the applications listed by APP. The error messages when APP is empty or
malformed have also been improved.
- removed the annoying 'the mangling of 'va_list' has changed in GCC 4.4'
warning when building with GCC 4.4.0 for ARM.
- C Library header fixes:
For all platforms:
- <arpa/inet.h>: no longer includes <netinet/in6.h>.
- <ctype.h>: better inlining with -ansi option.
- <mntent.h>: add missing include for <stdio.h>.
- <netinet/in.h>: include <netinet/in6.h> and define in6addr_any +
in6addr_loopback.
- <netinet/in6.h>: add IPV6_JOIN_GROUP, IPV6_LEAVE_GROUP,
IN6ADDR_ANY_INIT, ipv6mr_interface.
- <sys/epoll.h>: add missing C++ inclusion guards.
- <sys/resource.h>: add missing rlim_t declaration.
- <sys/system_properties.h>: add missing C++ inclusion guards.
- <time64.h>: add missing C++ inclusion guards.
- <netdb.h>: move h_errno declaration inside C++ inclusion guards.
- C Library changes:
For android-8 (a.k.a. Android 2.2):
- <dlfcn.h>: add DL_info and dladdr().
- <err.h>: add err(), warn() and other variants.
- <regex.h>, <fts.h>, <sys/queue.h>: added
- <pthread.h>: add pthread_condattr_t
- <sched.h>: added proper clone() declaration (and implementation).
- <signal.h>: added killpg().
- <stdio.h>: add fdprintf() and vfdprintf().
- <stdlib.h>: fix ptsname_r() signature in declaration. previous
implementation was broken anyway.
- <unistd.h>: add getusershell(), setusershell(), endusershell(),
ttyname(), ttyname_r(), TEMP_FAILURE_RETRY. Fix usleep() signature
(now returns int).
- <wchar.h>: add fake mbstowcs() and wcstombs().
More details available under docs/system/libc/CHANGES.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-r3
IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:
- Fix build/host-setup.sh to execute as a Bourne shell script (again)
- Make target shared libraries portable to systems that don't use the exact
same toolchain. This is needed due to differences in libgcc.a implementations
between gcc 4.2.1 and 4.4.0. This change ensures that generated machine
code doesn't depend on helper functions provided by the Android platform
runtime.
IMPORTANT CHANGES:
- GCC 4.4.0 is now used by default by the NDK. It generates better code than
GCC 4.2.1, which was used in previous releases. However, the compiler's C++
frontend is also a lot more pedantic regarding certain template constructs
and will even refuse to build some of them.
For this reason, the NDK also comes with GCC 4.2.1 prebuilt binaries, and
you can force its usage by defining NDK_TOOLCHAIN in your environment to
the value 'arm-eabi-4.2.1'. For example:
export NDK_TOOLCHAIN=arm-eabi-4.2.1
make APP=hello-jni
Note that only the 'armeabi' ABI is supported by the 4.2.1 toolchain. We
recommend switching to 4.2.1 *only* if you encounter compilation problems
with 4.4.0.
The 4.2.1 prebuilt binaries will probably be removed from a future release
of the Android NDK, we thus *strongly* invite you to fix your code if such
problems happen.
- Support for OpenGL ES 2.0. This is through the new 'android-5' platform to
reflect Android 2.0 (previously the Eclair branch). This is merely a copy
of android-4 that also includes headers and libraries for OpenGL ES 2.0.
See the sample named "hello-gl2" for a *very* basic demonstration. Note that
OpenGL ES 2.0 is currently *not* available from Java, and must be used
through native code exclusively.
IMPORTANT: OpenGL ES 2.0 is not supported in the Android emulator at this
time. Running/testing any native code that depends on it thus
requires a real device.
- The NDK build script will now remove installed binaries from the application
project's path before starting the build. This ensures that:
- if the build fails for some reason, a stale/obsolete file is not left in
your application project tree by mistake.
- if you change the target ABI, a stale/obsolete file is not left into the
folder corresponding to the old ABI.
- Updated the STABLE-APIS.html document to clarify the OpenGL ES 1.0/1.1/2.0
issues regarding specific devices (i.e. 1.0 supported everywhere, 1.1 and
2.0 on specific devices only, need for <uses-feature> tag in manifest).
OTHER FIXES AND CHANGES:
- Actually use the awk version detected by host-setup.sh during the build.
- Only allow undefined symbols when LOCAL_ALLOW_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS is set
to 'true', just like the documentation says it works. Also fix a typo
in CLEAR_VARS that prevented this variable from being cleared properly.
- Simplified build/tools/make-release.sh, the --prebuilt-dir option is
gone, and --help will dump a clearer description of expected options
and input files.
- Added --prebuilt-ndk=FILE option to build/tools/make-release.sh script to
package a new experimental NDK package archive from the current source tree
plus the toolchain binaries of an existing NDK release package. E.g.:
build/tools/make-release.sh \
--prebuilt-ndk=/path/to/android-ndk-1.6_r1-linux-x86.zip
will generate a new NDK package in /tmp/ndk-release that contains the most
up-to-date build scripts, plus the toolchain binaries from 1.6_r1 (which
are not in the git repository).
Also added the --no-git option to collect all sources from the current
NDK root directory, instead of the list given by 'git ls-files'. This can
be useful if you don't want to checkout the whole 'platform/development'
project from repo and still work on the NDK.
This change is to help people easily package experimental NDK releases to
test and distribute fixes and improvements.
- Remove bash-isms from build/tools/build-toolchain.sh. Now it's possible to
build it with the 'dash' shell on Debian-based systems (tested on Ubuntu 8.04)
- Remove bash-ism from build/tools/build-ndk-sysroot.sh
- Refresh C library headers for all platforms:
- make <endian.h> simply include <sys/endian.h>
- make <stdint.h> properly declare 64-bit integer types with a C99 compiler
- add missing <sys/types.h> to <strings.h>
- add GLibc-compatible macro aliases (st_atimensec, st_mtimensec and
st_ctimensec) to <stat.h>
- add missing declaration for tzset() in <time.h>
- Added build/tools/download-toolchain-sources.sh, a script that allows you
to download the toolchain sources from the official open-source repository
at android.git.kernel.org and nicely package them into a tarball that can
later be used by build/tools/build-toolchain.sh to rebuild the prebuilt
binaries for your system.
- Updated build/tools/build-toolchain.sh to support the tarballs generated
by download-toolchain-sources.sh with the --package=<file> option. This
also builds both gcc 4.2.1 and 4.4.0, adding support for armeabi-v7a to
gcc 4.4.0.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-1.6_r1
IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:
- Fix build/host-setup.sh to:
* execute as a Bourne shell script
* remove unused host gcc dependency
* improve Windows host auto-detection
* add GNU Make version check
* add Nawk/Gawk check
* ensure that the script is run from $NDKROOT as build/host-setup.sh
* add --help, --verbose, --no-awk-check and --no-make-check options
- Properly add sysroot library search path at build time. This makes a line
in Android.mk like:
LOCAL_LDLIBS := -lz
Actually work correctly, instead of having the linker complaining that it
could not find the corresponding libz.so library. Also clear LOCAL_LDLIBS
in $(CLEAR_VARS) script.
IMPORTANT CHANGES:
- The 'sources' directory is gone. The NDK build system now looks for
$(APP_PROJECT_PATH)/jni/Android.mk by default. You can override this with
the new APP_BUILD_SCRIPT variable in Application.mk
For example, the 'hello-jni' sample uses the following files:
apps/hello-jni/project/jni/Android.mk
apps/hello-jni/project/jni/hello-jni.c
The 'apps/<name>' directory is still needed in this release though.
- Change LOCAL_CFLAGS / LOCAL_CPPFLAGS to work as in the full Android build
system. This means that:
- LOCAL_CFLAGS is now used for *both* C and C++ sources (was only for C)
- LOCAL_CPPFLAGS is now used for C++ sources only (was for both C and C++)
- LOCAL_CXXFLAGS is used like LOCAL_CPPFLAGS but is considered obsolete.
(will disappear in next release)
Also fixed APP_CPPFLAGS / APP_CFLAGS / APP_CXXFLAGS correspondingly.
- Rename build/platforms/android-1.5 to build/platforms/android-3 to match
the Android API level instead of the marketing speak.
Also add a new build/platforms/android-4, and make the build system select
which platform to use based on the content of the project file named
$(APP_PROJECT_PATH)/default.properties.
- Add OpenGL ES 1.x headers and libraries to the android-4 stable APIs.
(NOTE: they are *not* available for android-3)
Also provide a small port of the "San Angeles Observation" demo to show
how to make a simple Android application that uses them.
OTHER FIXES AND CHANGES
- Ensure that the __ANDROID__ macro is always defined when building code
with the NDK. Normally, the macro must be defined by the toolchain
automatically to indicate that you're targetting the Android runtime.
This works for the new arm-linux-androideabi toolchain, but there is
a bug in the way we built the arm-eabi one, so add the flag manually
through the NDK build script for it.
Note that the ANDROID macro, is now deprecated. While it is still defined
by the NDK, you should modify your code to test against __ANDROID__ instead!
- Generate thumb binaries by default.
- Add support for LOCAL_ARM_MODE in Android.mk.
- Add support for the '.arm' suffix in source file names to force the
compilation of a single source in arm (32-bit) mode.
- Generate proper unoptimized versions of binaries when APP_OPTIM := debug
- Add support for LOCAL_C_INCLUDES in Android.mk
- Fix compilation of assembler files (e.g. foo.S)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-1.5_r1 released.