Porting to MIPS

[Androidphan]

Is it possible to port Android to a MIPS? What does it take to compile
it for this architecture? I read about libc, that this is not possible
to cross compile, so I need to build Dalvik against glibc? Are there
any other things I need to worry about before trying to cross compile
it for MIPS? What things are ARM specific?

[mcuelenaere]

My guesses would be bionic and dalvik needs porting (and perhaps other
stuff, but that seems like the most important ones).

Can I ask you to what device you're planning to port Android (as I'm
also possibly interested in an Android MIPS port)?

[David Turner]

You should start by porting the C library, which would involve:

- modifying the tools used to generate the syscalls stubs to emit MIPS assembler fragments, and the SYSCALLS.TXT input file for them
- probably grab a few OpenBSD mips-related arch-specific header files for configuration purposes
- regenerate the clean kernel headers for the 'arch-mips' sub-tree

Then, modify the dynamic linker to handle all MIPS-specific relocations.

Finally, if your CPU is big-endian, probably fix a few endian-related problems in the system or the tools like aapt, etc..

Hope this helps

[Androidphan]

At the moment I'm just doing research in how much effort it takes to
port it to a MIPS or PPC. A MIPS platform would be the Bestlink Alpha
400. For a PPC I would go for the Sam440-EP. I think porting Bionic
would take a lot of effort. I'm a student, I've been doing embedded
Linux for a year and a half now. I've got about 70 days together with
another person to do the job. Since I got no experience with Android
yet, that will take time as well. We'll start with porting it to an
x86 platform to get some experience.