One of the things I need for xqdr, the flying robot that I’m
building, is a terminal multiplexer, like screen or tmux. I use
tmux, personally, and jeepers wouldn’t it be neat to have it run
natively on my phone so that I don’t have to use ConnectBot to an
outside server and then do “tmux attach”?
Fortunately (or so I thought when starting this project), tmux is
written entirely in C. This turned out to be difficult, and so I’ll
outline how I did it.
The Android kernel uses a slimmed down version of standard C libraries
(libc.so), called bionic. This is where all the allowed calls are
stored. It’s possible to either:
Surprisingly, I attempted the second option first. This was insane. I
had to compile a compiler to compile a compiler to compile a
compiler to compile a shared object library through a perl
wrapper to compile the code. I think I made it through all the
compiling compilers parts, and then my finished compiler crapped all
over its pants.
It was at this point that I decided to check my phone, and I realised
that CyanogenMod7 already has a shared object library for standard C.
(It’s at /system/lib/libc.so). There is the possibility that I could use
this pre-ARM-compiled library, bundle it with tmux, and then use
Android NDK to compile tmux for ARM. This would also necessitate
creating a .JNI makefile for the frontend, which includes a trivial
amount of Java to wrap the native code.
I’ll update when I finish or fuck myself over, but right now I’m getting
on brutal series of international flights for Chaos Computer Club‘s
28C3 in Berlin, and my connection is slower than liberal reformist
tactics are at creating a freer society.
♥Ⓐ
