The NDK allows Android application developers to include native code in their Android application packages, compiled as JNI shared libraries.
See the Getting Started Guide for an introduction.
See the changelist for a list of changes since the previous release.
Finally, discussions related to the Android NDK happen on the android-ndk Google Group.
Note: This document is for developers of the NDK, not developers that use the NDK.
Both Linux and Windows host binaries are built on Linux machines. Windows host
binaries are built via MinGW cross compiler. Systems without a working MinGW
compiler can use build/tools/build-mingw64-toolchain.sh
to generate their own
and be added to the PATH
for build scripts to discover.
Building binaries for Mac OS X requires at least 10.8.
Target headers and binaries are built on Linux.
The NDK consists of three parts: host binaries, target prebuilts, and others (build system, docs, samples, tests).
toolchains/
contains GCC, Clang, and Renderscript toolchains.$TOOLCHAIN/config.mk
contains ARCH and ABIS this toolchain can handle.$TOOLCHAIN/setup.mk
contains toolchain-specific default CFLAGS/LDFLAGS when this toolchain is used.
prebuilt/$HOST_ARCH/
contains various tools to make the build system hermetic.- make, awk, sed, perl, python, yasm, and for Windows: cmp.exe and echo.exe
ndk-depends
andndk-stack
should probably go inprebuilt/
to avoid collisions between host variants.
platforms/android-N/arch-$ARCH_NAME/
contains headers and libraries for each API level.- The build system sets
--sysroot
to one of these directories based on user-specifiedAPP_ABI
andAPP_PLATFORM
.
- The build system sets
sources/cxx-stl/$STL/$ABI/
contains the headers and libraries for the various C++ STLs.prebuilt/android-$ARCH/gdbserver/
contains gdbserver.
build/
contains the ndk-build system and scripts to rebuild NDK.docs/
samples/
sources/
contains modules useful in samples and apps via$(call import-module, $MODULE)
tests/
-
-
Check out the branch
master-ndk
repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest \ -b master-ndk # Googlers, use repo init -u \ persistent-https://android.git.corp.google.com/platform/manifest \ -b master-ndk
-
The only difference between the NDK branch and master is that the NDK repository already has the toolchain repository checked out and patched.
-
-
Additional Linux Dependencies (available from apt):
- texinfo
- gcc-mingw32
- wine
- bison
- flex
- dmake
- libtool
- pbzip2
-
Mac OS X also requires Xcode.
$ python checkbuild.py --no-package
$ python checkbuild.py --system windows
The simplest way to package an NDK on Linux is to just omit the --no-package
flag when running checkbuild.py
. This will take a little longer though, so it
may not be desired for day to day development.
To package the NDK for Windows or Darwin (or if more control over the packaging
process is needed), invoke build/tools/package-release.sh
directly. This
process will be improved in a future commit.
- Do not run
build/tools/dev-cleanup.sh
which erases all prebuilts. - Remove the individual prebuilt directory if new build deletes files. This is rare.
- Package NDK from prebuilt tarballs in
$PREBUILT_PATH
. It runsbuild/tools/build-docs.sh
which produces no tarball in$PREBUILT_PATH
. - Unpack and compare against the previous package.