Android ART tools

Question

As we know the code related with Android ART can be found here

Looking through the source we can find the source of ART build tools, e.g. dex2oat, dexdump, oatdump, etc.

Has anyone seen any proper guide how to build and run any of the tools on Unix/Windows based machines?

Answer 1

Concerning the tools:

After checking out the AOSP code, there is a lot you can do beside building the whole system. The build system supports building single modules. make modules will print out all possible targets that can be build using make. If you for example want to build oatdump and its dependencies, you will use make oatdump. I had a quick look at the list and all three of the tools you mentioned can be build this way.

Concerning the build environment The official documentation states that

You will need to use Linux or Mac OS. Building under Windows is not currently supported.

However, the guys from XDA prepared a nice ubuntu virtual machine that is stripped down to just the stuff that you need to build AOSP or custom ROMs. Using this, you can build inside the virtual machine. But let me warn you that building AOSP takes up quite a lot of time and space, and moving this to a VM makes it even worse.