[android-x86/ndk.git] / docs / CHANGES.TXT

Android NDK ChangeLog:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-r4

IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:

- The <fenv.h> header was not placed in the correct location and could not
  be found by normal builds.

IMPORTANT CHANGES:

- Simplified build system: You no longer need to run build/host-setup.sh
  or modify anything under $NDK_ROOT/apps/. Instead, just invoke the
  new 'ndk-build' script from your application's project directory, or
  one of its sub-directories.

  See docs/OVERVIEW.TXT and docs/NDK-BUILD.TXT for more details.

  NOTE: For compatibility purpose, you can still define projects
        through $NDK_ROOT/apps/<name> though.

- Easy native debugging support when running debuggable applications
  on Android 2.2 or higher, through the new 'ndk-gdb' helper script.
  See docs/NDK-GDB.TXT for details.

- Support for hardware FPU. This is through the new 'armeabi-v7a' ABI
  corresponding to ARMv7-a class devices.

  Note that by default, the NDK will still generate machine code for the old
  'armeabi' ABI (ARMv5TE based) which is supported by all official Android
  system images to date.

  You will need to define APP_ABI in your Application.mk file to change this.
  See docs/APPLICATION-MK.TXT

  More details about ABIs is now available in docs/CPU-ARCH-ABIS.TXT

- A small static library named 'cpufeatures' is provided with source code
  and can be used at runtime to determine the CPU features supported by the
  target device. It should run on all Android platforms, starting from 1.5.

  For more information, see docs/CPU-FEATURES.TXT

- Support for the optional ARM Advanced SIMD (a.k.a. NEON) instruction set
  extension through the use the LOCAL_ARM_NEON variable in Android.mk, or
  the '.neon' suffix when listing source files.

  Neon is an *optional* instruction set extension, and not all Android ARMv7
  devices will support it. You will need to use the 'cpufeatures' library to
  determine if such code can be used at runtime, and provide alternate code
  paths if this is not the case. This is similar to MMX/SSE/3DNow on x86
  platforms.

  For more information, see docs/CPU-ARM-NEON.TXT

- Added a new sample (hello-neon) to demonstrate usage of 'cpufeatures'
  and NEON intrinsics & build support.

OTHER FIXES & CHANGES:

- support the .s extension for raw assembly sources (.S is already supported
  but the input files are parsed by the C-preprocessor before being sent to
  the assembler).

- build/host-setup.sh has been removed. There is no need for a 'setup' step
  when using the NDK for the first time. All host-specific autodetection and
  basic tool sanity checking have been moved to the build scripts themselves.

- APP_MODULES in Application.mk is now optional. If not defined, the NDK
  will simply build _all_ the modules that are declared from your Android.mk.

  You can still use APP_MODULES to restrict the set of modules you want to
  build. Note that the NDK now computes the transitive dependencies of these
  modules for you now. See docs/APPLICATION-MK.TXT for details.

- docs/STABLE-APIS.TXT: Add missing section for Dynamic Linker Library
  (libdl.so). It is actually supported by all API levels.

- build/tools/download-toolchain-sources.sh: Use 'master' branch by default
  instead of the 'eclair' one.

- build-toolchain.sh: Allow ad-hoc patching of toolchain sources when rebuilding
  them. This is primarily to ease development. All you need to do is put a patch
  under build/tools/toolchain-patches/<foo>/<name>.patch, and it will be applied
  with 'patch -p1' into the <foo> directory of the unpacked toolchain sources
  before the configure step. 

- docs/CPU-ARCH-ABIS.TXT: Mention the experimental 'x86' ABI.

- build/core/mkdeps.sh: Removed obsolete script.

- the NDK build script now only parses the Application.mk and Android.mk of
  the applications listed by APP. The error messages when APP is empty or
  malformed have also been improved.

- removed the annoying 'the mangling of 'va_list' has changed in GCC 4.4'
  warning when building with GCC 4.4.0 for ARM.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-r3

IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:

- Fix build/host-setup.sh to execute as a Bourne shell script (again)

- Make target shared libraries portable to systems that don't use the exact
  same toolchain. This is needed due to differences in libgcc.a implementations
  between gcc 4.2.1 and 4.4.0. This change ensures that generated machine
  code doesn't depend on helper functions provided by the Android platform
  runtime.


IMPORTANT CHANGES:

- GCC 4.4.0 is now used by default by the NDK. It generates better code than
  GCC 4.2.1, which was used in previous releases. However, the compiler's C++
  frontend is also a lot more pedantic regarding certain template constructs
  and will even refuse to build some of them.

  For this reason, the NDK also comes with GCC 4.2.1 prebuilt binaries, and
  you can force its usage by defining NDK_TOOLCHAIN in your environment to
  the value 'arm-eabi-4.2.1'. For example:

        export NDK_TOOLCHAIN=arm-eabi-4.2.1
        make APP=hello-jni

  Note that only the 'armeabi' ABI is supported by the 4.2.1 toolchain. We
  recommend switching to 4.2.1 *only* if you encounter compilation problems
  with 4.4.0.

  The 4.2.1 prebuilt binaries will probably be removed from a future release
  of the Android NDK, we thus *strongly* invite you to fix your code if such
  problems happen.

- Support for OpenGL ES 2.0. This is through the new 'android-5' platform to
  reflect Android 2.0 (previously the Eclair branch). This is merely a copy
  of android-4 that also includes headers and libraries for OpenGL ES 2.0.

  See the sample named "hello-gl2" for a *very* basic demonstration. Note that
  OpenGL ES 2.0 is currently *not* available from Java, and must be used
  through native code exclusively.

  IMPORTANT: OpenGL ES 2.0 is not supported in the Android emulator at this
             time. Running/testing any native code that depends on it thus
             requires a real device.

- The NDK build script will now remove installed binaries from the application
  project's path before starting the build. This ensures that:

  - if the build fails for some reason, a stale/obsolete file is not left in
    your application project tree by mistake.

  - if you change the target ABI, a stale/obsolete file is not left into the
    folder corresponding to the old ABI.


- Updated the STABLE-APIS.TXT document to clarify the OpenGL ES 1.0/1.1/2.0
  issues regarding specific devices (i.e. 1.0 supported everywhere, 1.1 and
  2.0 on specific devices only, need for <uses-feature> tag in manifest).


OTHER FIXES & CHANGES:

- Actually use the awk version detected by host-setup.sh during the build.

- Only allow undefined symbols when LOCAL_ALLOW_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS is set
  to 'true', just like the documentation says it works. Also fix a typo
  in CLEAR_VARS that prevented this variable from being cleared properly.

- Simplified build/tools/make-release.sh, the --prebuilt-dir option is
  gone, and --help will dump a clearer description of expected options
  and input files.

- Added --prebuilt-ndk=FILE option to build/tools/make-release.sh script to
  package a new experimental NDK package archive from the current source tree
  plus the toolchain binaries of an existing NDK release package. E.g.:

    build/tools/make-release.sh \
       --prebuilt-ndk=/path/to/android-ndk-1.6_r1-linux-x86.zip

  will generate a new NDK package in /tmp/ndk-release that contains the most
  up-to-date build scripts, plus the toolchain binaries from 1.6_r1 (which
  are not in the git repository).

  Also added the --no-git option to collect all sources from the current
  NDK root directory, instead of the list given by 'git ls-files'. This can
  be useful if you don't want to checkout the whole 'platform/development'
  project from repo and still work on the NDK.

  This change is to help people easily package experimental NDK releases to
  test and distribute fixes and improvements.

- Remove bash-isms from build/tools/build-toolchain.sh. Now it's possible to
  build it with the 'dash' shell on Debian-based systems (tested on Ubuntu 8.04)

- Remove bash-ism from build/tools/build-ndk-sysroot.sh

- Refresh C library headers for all platforms:

    - make <endian.h> simply include <sys/endian.h>
    - make <stdint.h> properly declare 64-bit integer types with a C99 compiler
    - add missing <sys/types.h> to <strings.h>
    - add GLibc-compatible macro aliases (st_atimensec, st_mtimensec and
      st_ctimensec) to <stat.h>
    - add missing declaration for tzset() in <time.h>

- Added build/tools/download-toolchain-sources.sh, a script that allows you
  to download the toolchain sources from the official open-source repository
  at android.git.kernel.org and nicely package them into a tarball that can
  later be used by build/tools/build-toolchain.sh to rebuild the prebuilt
  binaries for your system.

- Updated build/tools/build-toolchain.sh to support the tarballs generated
  by download-toolchain-sources.sh with the --package=<file> option. This
  also builds both gcc 4.2.1 and 4.4.0, adding support for armeabi-v7a to
  gcc 4.4.0.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-1.6_r1

IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:

- Fix build/host-setup.sh to:
  * execute as a Bourne shell script
  * remove unused host gcc dependency
  * improve Windows host auto-detection
  * add GNU Make version check
  * add Nawk/Gawk check
  * ensure that the script is run from $NDKROOT as build/host-setup.sh
  * add --help, --verbose, --no-awk-check and --no-make-check options

- Properly add sysroot library search path at build time. This makes a line
  in Android.mk like:

     LOCAL_LDLIBS := -lz

  Actually work correctly, instead of having the linker complaining that it
  could not find the corresponding libz.so library. Also clear LOCAL_LDLIBS
  in $(CLEAR_VARS) script.


IMPORTANT CHANGES:

- The 'sources' directory is gone. The NDK build system now looks for
  $(APP_PROJECT_PATH)/jni/Android.mk by default. You can override this with
  the new APP_BUILD_SCRIPT variable in Application.mk

  For example, the 'hello-jni' sample uses the following files:

    apps/hello-jni/project/jni/Android.mk
    apps/hello-jni/project/jni/hello-jni.c

  The 'apps/<name>' directory is still needed in this release though.

- Change LOCAL_CFLAGS / LOCAL_CPPFLAGS to work as in the full Android build
  system. This means that:

    - LOCAL_CFLAGS   is now used for *both* C and C++ sources  (was only for C)
    - LOCAL_CPPFLAGS is now used for C++ sources only (was for both C and C++)
    - LOCAL_CXXFLAGS is used like LOCAL_CPPFLAGS but is considered obsolete.
      (will disappear in next release)

  Also fixed APP_CPPFLAGS / APP_CFLAGS / APP_CXXFLAGS correspondingly.

- Rename build/platforms/android-1.5 to build/platforms/android-3 to match
  the Android API level instead of the marketing speak.

  Also add a new build/platforms/android-4, and make the build system select
  which platform to use based on the content of the project file named
  $(APP_PROJECT_PATH)/default.properties.

- Add OpenGL ES 1.x headers and libraries to the android-4 stable APIs.
  (NOTE: they are *not* available for android-3)

  Also provide a small port of the "San Angeles Observation" demo to show
  how to make a simple Android application that uses them.


OTHER FIXES & CHANGES

- Generate thumb binaries by default.

- Add support for LOCAL_ARM_MODE in Android.mk.

- Add support for the '.arm' suffix in source file names to force the
  compilation of a single source in arm (32-bit) mode.

- Generate proper unoptimized versions of binaries when APP_OPTIM := debug

- Add support for LOCAL_C_INCLUDES in Android.mk

- Fix compilation of assembler files (e.g. foo.S)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
android-ndk-1.5_r1 released.