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Jasmine Chen

Pursuing dreams, one step at a time.

• on Servo

Building servo for Android

#Build #Servo #Android

In case you don’t already know, I will be working on a front-end prototype for the servo browser for my Bachlor’s Thesis!
servo is a new browser engine written from scratch by Mozilla.

I have a blog page on hackmd which will be used to log and keep track of the progress of the project.

References

So the first thing is obviously building servo (for Android).
Here were the steps I went through:

1. Setup Virtual Machine

Setup a Kubuntu 16.04 VM with 4GB of RAM.

Lessons I learned:

  • I failed at packaging on (K)ubuntu 16.10 due to Java compatibility issues.
  • A minimum of 3GB of RAM is required.

2. Install Dependencies

sudo apt-get install git curl freeglut3-dev autoconf \
    libfreetype6-dev libgl1-mesa-dri libglib2.0-dev xorg-dev \
    gperf g++ build-essential cmake virtualenv python-pip \
    libssl-dev libbz2-dev libosmesa6-dev libxmu6 libxmu-dev \
    libglu1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libdbus-1-dev

Lessons I learned:

  • The official build guide names libssl1.0-dev which seems to be renamed to libssl-dev.

3. Install Android SDK & NDK

3.1 Download and install Android Studio to get the SDK.

Open a new project with Min. API set to 18.

3.2 Install Android NDK manually.

# Operating on home directory as regular user
cd ~

# Download Android NDK r12b
wget https://dl.google.com/android/repository/android-ndk-r12b-linux-x86_64.zip

# Unzip to the directory of the SDK
unzip android-ndk-r12b-linux-x86_64.zip -d Android/Sdk

3.3 Set the Environment Variables

Place these lines inside .bashrc (in home directory).

export ANDROID_SDK="/home/#####/Android/Sdk"
export ANDROID_NDK="/home/#####/Android/Sdk/android-ndk-r12b"
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_SDK/platform-tools

Then reload shell config with:

source ~/.bashrc

Lessons I learned:

  • Android NDK r12b is required (Tested with newer versions).
  • ANDROID_SDK and ANDROID_NDK need to be set globally. The official guide is missing the export keyword.

4. Install Additional Tools

Install all required tools listed on the wiki:

# Get complete libraries
cd $ANDROID_SDK
tools/android - update sdk --no-ui --all --filter platform-tools,android-18,build-tools-23.0.3

# Install ant
sudo apt-get install ant

Install openjdk-7-jdk: (IMPORTANT)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

Lessons I Learned:

  • The other packages mentioned in the Wiki are either nonexistent or unnecessary, at least for Ubuntu 16.04.
  • Both OpenJDK 7 & 8 are required for some reason.

5. Building

You need to build servo with OpenJDK 7 to generate compatible java executables for Android dex.
Run these following commands to do so:

sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo update-alternatives --config javac

Then you can move on to building it:

# Get source
git clone https://github.com/mozilla/servo.git
cd servo

# Build
# Replace "--release" with "--dev" to create an unoptimized debug build.
./mach build --release --android

6. Packaging

You should revert back to OpenJDK 8 while packaging.
Again with the same commands:

sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo update-alternatives --config javac

Then proceed:

./mach package --release --android

If all go smoothly, you will get servo.apk inside the target/arm-linux-androideabi/release/ directory.