The Linux Foundation
Android Builders Summit 2013
Deep Dive into Android IPC/Binder Framework
By Aleksander Gargenta
San Francisco, California
Inter Process Communication (IPC) has been a part of Android since 1.0, and yet most of us take it for granted. Intents, content providers, and system service managers hide the IPC infrastructure provided by Binder, but without it, the Android OS and our apps would simply fall apart. Binder/IPC is the glue that holds it all together. It enables Android's memory management, security sandboxing, efficient threading, and countless other features on the Android platform. In this talk we walk-through Binder top-to-bottom: from apps to middleware to the kernel driver. We discuss language issues (Java vs C++), data types, threading model, sync/async execution modes, security implications, latency, memory-sharing, debugging, limitations, and so on. If you want to understand how Android really works or would like to build your own app/framework clients or services, than this talk is for you.
