Develop Reference

How to use ashmem in native code (without binder) [duplicate]

I want to share data between two (ndk-)processes. For this I use ashmem using this source.
One process is continuously reading (read_mem) and one process is writing one time (write_mem).
The problem is that the read process is not getting the values of the writer.
AND
By watching the maps of the reader I found that android deletes the shared memory file right after ashmem_create_region.
read_mem.c
// read_mem.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include "ashmem.h"
#define SHM_NAME "test_mem"
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int shID = ashmem_create_region(SHM_NAME, 2);
if (shID < 0)
{
perror("ashmem_create_region failed\n");
return 1;
}
// right here /dev/ashmem/test_mem is deleted
printf("ashmem_create_region: %d\n", shID);
char *sh_buffer = (char*)mmap(NULL, 2, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, shID, 0);
if (sh_buffer == (char*)-1)
{
perror("mmap failed");
return 1;
}
printf("PID=%d", getpid());
do
{
printf("VALUE = 0x%x\n", sh_buffer[0]);
}
while (getchar());
return 0;
}
write_mem.c
// write_mem.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include "ashmem.h"
#define SHM_NAME "test_mem"
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int shID = ashmem_create_region(SHM_NAME, 2);
if (shID < 0)
{
perror("ashmem_create_region failed\n");
return 1;
}
printf("ashmem_create_region: %d\n", shID);
char *sh_buffer = (char*)mmap(NULL, 2, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, shID, 0);
if (sh_buffer == (char*)-1)
{
perror("mmap failed");
return 1;
}
printf("PID=%d\n", getpid());
int ch = getchar();
sh_buffer[0] = ch;
printf("Written 0x%x\n", ch);
munmap(sh_buffer, 2);
close(shID);
return 0;
}
This is the output:
Reading
130|shell#mako:/data/local/tmp $ ./read_mem
ashmem_create_region: 3
PID=29655
VALUE = 0x0
Writing
shell#mako:/data/local/tmp $ ./write_mem
ashmem_create_region: 3
PID=29691
A
Written 0x41
Reading again VALUE = 0x0 (by pressing return)
Watching the maps of the reader:
shell#mako:/ $ cat /proc/29655/maps | grep test_mem
b6ef5000-b6ef6000 rw-s 00000000 00:04 116213 /dev/ashmem/test_mem (deleted)
as you can see test_mem is deleted WHILE read_mem is still alive.
Other Information
Both files are compiled as executable using the android ndk-buildcommand
Device: LG Nexus 4 (AOSP Lollypop)
I checked /dev/ashmem it exists.
ashmem taken from here

Ashmem doesn't work like regular shared memory on Linux, and there is a good reason for it.
First, let's try to explain the "(deleted)" part, this is an implementation detail of how ashmem is implemented in the kernel. What it really means is that a file entry was created in the /dev/ashmem/ directory, then later removed, but that the corresponding i-node still exists because there is at least one open file-descriptor for it.
You could actually create several ashmem regions with the same name, and they would all appear as "/dev/ashmem/<name> (deleted)", but each one of them would correspond to a different i-node, and thus a different memory region. And if you look under /dev/ashmem/ you would see that the directory is still empty.
That's why the name of an ashmem region is really only used for debugging. There is no way to 'open' an existing region by name.
An ashmem i-node, and corresponding memory, is automatically reclaimed when the last file descriptor to it is closed. This is useful because it means that if your process dies due to a crash, the memory will be reclaimed by the kernel automatically. This is not the case with regular SysV shared memory (a crashing process just leaks the memory! Something unacceptable on an embedded system like Android).
Your test programs create two distinct ashmem regions with the same name, that's why they dont work as you think they should. What you need instead is:
1) Create a single ashmem region in one of the process.
2) Pass a new file descriptor to the region from the first process to the second one.
One way to do that is to fork the first process to create the second (this will automatically duplicate the file descriptors), but this is generally not a good idea under Android.
A better alternative is to use sendmsg() and recvmsg() to send the file descriptor through a Unix-domain socket between the two processes. This is generally tricky, but as an example, have a look at the SendFd() and ReceiveFd() functions in the following source file was written for the NDK:
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/android-5.0.0_r7/sources/android/crazy_linker/tests/test_util.h
Voila, hope this helps

Android OpenCV parallelize loops

I know that OpenMP is included in NDK (usage example here: http://recursify.com/blog/2013/08/09/openmp-on-android ). I've done what it says on that page but when I use: #pragma omp for on a simple for loop that scans a vector, the app crashes with the famous "fatal signal 11".
What am I missing here? Btw I use a modified example from the Android samples, it's Tutorial 2 Mixed Processing. All I want is to parallelize (multithread) some of the for loops and nested for loops that I have in the jni c++ file while using OpenCV.
Any help/suggestion is appreciated!
Edit: sample code added:
#pragma omp parallel for
Mat tmp(iheight, iwidth, CV_8UC1);
for (int x = 0; x < iheight; x++) {
for (int y = 0; y < iwidth; y++) {
int value = (int) buffer[x * iwidth + y];
tmp.at<uchar>(x, y) = value;
}
}
Based on this: http://www.slideshare.net/noritsuna/how-to-use-openmp-on-native-activity
Thanks!

I think this is a known issue in GOMP, see Bug 42616 and Bug 52738.
It's about your app will crash if you try to use OpenMP directives or functions on a non-main thread, and can be traced back to the gomp_thread() function (see libgomp/libgomp.h # line 362 and 368) which returns NULL for threads you create:
#ifdef HAVE_TLS
extern __thread struct gomp_thread gomp_tls_data;
static inline struct gomp_thread *gomp_thread (void)
{
return &gomp_tls_data;
}
#else
extern pthread_key_t gomp_tls_key;
static inline struct gomp_thread *gomp_thread (void)
{
return pthread_getspecific (gomp_tls_key);
}
#endif
As you can see GOMP uses different implementation depending on whether or not thread-local storage (TLS) is available.
If it is available, then HAVE_TLS flag is set, and a global variable is used to track the state of each thread,
Otherwise, thread-local data will be managed via the function pthread_setspecific.
In the earlier version of NDKs the thread-local storage (the __thread keyword) isn't supported so HAVE_TLS won't be defined, therefore pthread_setspecific will be used.
Remark: I'm not sure whether __thread is supported or not in the last version of NDK, but here you can read the same answers about Android TLS.
When GOMP creates a worker thread, it sets up the thread specific data in the function gomp_thread_start() (line 72):
#ifdef HAVE_TLS
thr = &gomp_tls_data;
#else
struct gomp_thread local_thr;
thr = &local_thr;
pthread_setspecific (gomp_tls_key, thr);
#endif
But, when the application creates a thread independently, the thread specific data isn't set, and so the gomp_thread() function returns NULL. This causes the crash and this isn't a problem when TLS is supported, since the global variable that's used will always be available
I remember that this issue had been fixed android-ndk-r10d, but it only works with background processes (no Java). It means when you enable OpenMP and create a native thread from JNI (what is called from Java Android) then your app will crash remains.

Is it possible to get notification when any app is start in android device

I want that when I start any application in device then it should notify me (programmatically).
Is it possible to get notification of any app when run(launch).

You can get the current running process by ActivityManager#getRunningAppProcesses. But it is definitely impossible to get notified when application started without get your device rooted.
When Android starts a new application, Zygote will fork a new process:
static void Dalvik_dalvik_system_Zygote_forkAndSpecialize(const u4* args,
JValue* pResult)
{
pid_t pid;
pid = forkAndSpecializeCommon(args, false);
RETURN_INT(pid);
}
You can modify and replace the libdvm.so.
Another approach:
Any program which is dynamically linked is going to access certain files on startup, such as the dynamic linker. This would be useless for security purposes since it won't trigger on a statically linked program, but might still be of interest:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/inotify.h>
#include <assert.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
char buf[256];
struct inotify_event *event;
int fd, wd;
fd=inotify_init();
assert(fd > -1);
assert((wd=inotify_add_watch(fd, "/lib/ld-linux.so.2", IN_OPEN)) > 0);
printf("Watching for events, wd is %x\n", wd);
while (read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf))) {
event = (void *) buf;
printf("watch %d mask %x name(len %d)=\"%s\"\n",
event->wd, event->mask, event->len, event->name);
}
inotify_rm_watch(fd, wd);
return 0;
}
This requires root privilege, so with JNI and a rooted device, you will be able to do this.

No, this is not really possible using the public SDK.
At best, you could constantly keep polling the ActivityManager for the foreground process that's right on top, and keep a log of that. However, it isn't the most accurate, or efficient method.

Application is hanged after call nested function with Android NDK

I build Android project where I use Android NDK with LibXTract to extract audio features. LibXTract use fftw3 library. Project is consisted of button which runs simple example form libxtract:
JNIEXPORT void JNICALL Java_com_androidnative1_NativeClass_showText(JNIEnv *env, jclass clazz)
{
float mean = 0, vector[] = {.1, .2, .3, .4, -.5, -.4, -.3, -.2, -.1}, spectrum[10];
int n, N = 9;
float argf[4];
argf[0] = 8000.f;
argf[1] = XTRACT_MAGNITUDE_SPECTRUM;
argf[2] = 0.f;
argf[3] = 0.f;
xtract[XTRACT_MEAN]((void *)&vector, N, 0, (void *)&mean);
__android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_DEBUG, "AndNat", "com_androidnative1_NativeClass.c before");
xtract_init_fft(N, XTRACT_SPECTRUM);
__android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_DEBUG, "AndNat", "com_androidnative1_NativeClass.c after");
// Comment for test purpose
//xtract_init_bark(1, argf[1], 1);
//xtract[XTRACT_SPECTRUM]((void *)&vector, N, &argf[0], (void *)&spectrum[0]);
}
Libxtract function xtract_init_fft locate in jni/libxtract/jni/src/init.c execute fftw3 function fftwf_plan_r2r_1d located at jni/fftw3/jni/api/plan-r2r-1d.c
__android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_DEBUG, "AndNat", "libxtract/src/init.c before");
fft_plans.spectrum_plan = fftwf_plan_r2r_1d(N, input, output, FFTW_R2HC, optimisation);
__android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_DEBUG, "AndNat", "libxtract/src/init.c after");
Application hang inside fftwf_paln_r2r_1d without crash or any outher error I must force it to stop working.
fftwf_paln_r2r_1d looks like:
X(plan) X(plan_r2r_1d)(int n, R *in, R *out, X(r2r_kind) kind, unsigned flags)
{
__android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_DEBUG, "AndNat", "fftw3/api/plan-r2r-1d.c");
return X(plan_r2r)(1, &n, in, out, &kind, flags);
}
From CatLog I can see:
07-16 18:50:09.615: D/AndNat(7313): com_androidnative1_NativeClass.c before
07-16 18:50:09.615: D/AndNat(7313): libxtract/src/init.c before
07-16 18:50:09.615: D/AndNat(7313): fftw3/api/plan-r2r-1d.c
I genereate config.h for fftw3 and libxtract with gen.sh scripts locate in source folder with success. Both librearies are build as static and linked with shared libary libcom_androidnative1_NativeClass.so
Command
nm -Ca libcom_androidnative1_NativeClass.so
shows that used function is included.
Application is built and deploys to device without any problems.
I build fftw3 with flags --disable-alloca, --enable-float and LibXTract with flags --enable-fft and --disable-dependency-tracking
Only ingerention in library source code was added dbgprint and remove define XTRACT_FFT form LibXtract beacouse it can't detect fftw library.
If somebody have any idea about this strange for me behavior please help.
Here I put entire project in github so maybe someone can help me handle this.
https://github.com/bl0ndynek/AndroidNative1

Thanks for FFTW3 maintainer problem is solved.
Solution was to change optimization level from FFTW_MEASURE to FFTW_ESTIMATE (from 1 to 0) in FFTW3,
FFTW's planner (in xtract_init_fft) actually executes and times different possible FFT algorithms in order to pick the fastest plan for a given n. In order to do this in as short a time as possible, however, the timer must have a very high resolution, and to accomplish this FFTW3 employ the hardware cycle counters that are available on most CPUs but not on Android default ARM configuration.
So this algorithm use gettimeofday() witch have low resolution and on ARM took forever on xtract_init_fft.

It looks to me like you are missing some terminating condition in your recursive function X() which would put you in an infinite loop.

printf, logcat and \n

I have C code that uses prints with something clever like
printf("hello ");
// do something
printf(" world!\n");
which outputs
hello world!
I want to reuse that code with Android and iOS, but Log.d() and NSLog() effectively add a newline at the end of every string I pass them, so that the output of this code:
NSLog(#"hello ");
// do something
NSLog(#"world!\n");
comes out (more or less) as:
hello
world!
I'm willing to replace printf with some macro to make Log.d and NSLog emulate printf's handling of '\n'; any suggestions?

One solution that might work is to define a global log function that doesn't flush its buffer until it finds a newline.
Here's a (very) simple version in java for android:
import java.lang.StringBuilder;
class CustomLogger {
private static final StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();
public static void log(String message) {
buffer.append(message);
if(message.indexOf('\n') != -1) {
Log.d('SomeTag', buffer);
buffer.setLength(0);
}
}
}
...
CustomLogger.log("Hello, ");
// Stuff
CustomLogger.log("world!\n"); // Now the message gets logged
It's completely untested but you get the idea.
This particular script has some performance issues. It might be better to check if just the last character is a newline for example.
I just realized that you wanted this in C. It shouldn't be too hard to port though a standard lib wouldn't hurt (to get stuff like a string buffer).

For progeny, this is what I did: store logged strings in a buffer, and print the part before the newline whenever there is a newline in the buffer.

Yes, the NDK logcat is dumb about it. There are ways to redirect stderr/stdout to logcat, but there are drawbacks (either need to "adb shell setprop" which is only for rooted devices, or a dup() like technique but creating a thread just for that purpose is not a good idea on embedded devices IMHO though you can look further below for this technique).
So I did my own function/macros for that purpose. Here are snippets. In a debug.c, do this:
#include "debug.h"
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
static const char LOG_TAG[] = "jni";
void android_log(android_LogPriority type, const char *fmt, ...)
{
static char buf[1024];
static char *bp = buf;
va_list vl;
va_start(vl, fmt);
int available = sizeof(buf) - (bp - buf);
int nout = vsnprintf(bp, available, fmt, vl);
if (nout >= available) {
__android_log_write(type, LOG_TAG, buf);
__android_log_write(ANDROID_LOG_WARN, LOG_TAG, "previous log line has been truncated!");
bp = buf;
} else {
char *lastCR = strrchr(bp, '\n');
bp += nout;
if (lastCR) {
*lastCR = '\0';
__android_log_write(type, LOG_TAG, buf);
char *rest = lastCR+1;
int len = bp - rest; // strlen(rest)
memmove(buf, rest, len+1); // no strcpy (may overlap)
bp = buf + len;
}
}
va_end(vl);
}
Then in debug.h do this:
#include <android/log.h>
void android_log(android_LogPriority type, const char *fmt, ...);
#define LOGI(...) android_log(ANDROID_LOG_INFO, __VA_ARGS__)
#define LOGW(...) android_log(ANDROID_LOG_WARN, __VA_ARGS__)
...
Now you just need to include debug.hpp and call LOGI() with a printf-like semantic buffered until a '\n' is encountered (or buffer is full).
This is not perfect though, as if the string generated from a call is longer than the buffer, it will be truncated and output. But frankly, 1024 chars should be enough in most cases (even less than this). Anyway, if this happens it will output a warning so you know about it.
Also note the vsnprintf() is not standard C (but it works in Android NDK). We could use vsprintf() instead (which is standard), but it is unsafe on its own.
======================================================================
Now for the dup() technique, you can look here (James Moore answer).
Then you can get rid of the function above and define your macro as:
#define LOG(...) fprintf(stderr, ...)
and you're done.
Advantages:
C/C++ libraries often use stderr for their logs. Using dup is the only way to have their output in logcat without modifying their code (some big ones use hundreds of direct calls to fprintf(stderr, ...))
stderr is standard C used since decades. All standard C library functions related to streams can be used with it. Same for C++, you can even use cerr with << operator. It works since under the hood, it still stderr.
Very long lines not truncated (instead, their are split). A good reason to use a shorter buffer (256 in the example).
Disadvantages:
A thread on its own (though it's an IO only thread, impact is close to nothing)
No log priority value (INFO, WARN, ERROR, etc...) can be choosen during the call. It uses a default one (INFO), so DMMS will always show stderr lines in the same color.

You could always just build the string one segment at a time:
String message = "Hello";
// Do Something
message += " World!";
Log.v("Example", message);