How to get the read and write speed of android RAM? - android

I need to test the performance of android's ram. How can I get the read and write speed of android RAM.
Since I have root authority and busybox, the method can be a bash shell or an android app.
Thanks.

You will need to write your own benchmark, or look up the statistics on benchmark providers such as PassMask Android. Benchmark writing involves a lot of methodologies (rules to be followed to get a correct, meaningful, and reproducible result.)

Measure memory speed doing what? It depends on what instructions are handling the data and whether the access is sequential or random (or backwards). It can also vary with multithreading using one or multiple cores. The following has results of my three Android memory benchmarks (and links to MP results). These might help in deciding what to do.
http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/android%20benchmarks.htm#anchorStart

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Android: can c++ code be aware of Android app memory use?

I have been searching for this answer for days and can't find a straightforward answer. I am working on an application written in C++ and that has been ported to Android. I am able to launch and run without too much hassle. My task is to figure out how much RAM our app is using dynamically so that we can handle memory issues dynamically-- which in my mind means that I need to have something in my C++ that can somehow be aware of system characteristics. What I have been able to do, is in my Java code, I can pull certain metrics that belong to my app via the getMemoryInfo call. Like in this post: Programmatically find Android system info
However, I would really like to be able to probe this from our C++ code so that we can handle everything in there...
Is this even possible?
If it is, are the calls unrealistically expensive?
If it is not, how is it possible to manage your memory through the native code rather than the Java code? i.e. If I see that I only have x amount of RAM available, I can dynamically change how much memory I want allocated to something in my C++ code to accommodate what the system has to offer.
Something along the lines of:
Ex. C++ Code:
if (android.os.thisApp.RAM left < 20 )
allocate 10M
else
allocate 20M

Is RenderScript local thread synchronization possible?

On a recent SO question, I explained how calling a RenderScript kernel multiple times will effectively force all threads to be globally synchronized between calls.
I am currently working with multiple convolutions applied in sequence to image data. Since the convolution algorithm requires reading surrounding pixel data of the input image, I have implemented a workflow where my own custom kernel is called multiple times -- to make sure that at every step, all data from the previous convolution is ready and available at the correct coordinates. This technique has worked great for me so far.
However, in my constant quest for optimization, I have noticed that there is much performance to be obtained by keeping intermediate values in local registers for a thread, instead of writing them back to the global memory allocation in between kernel calls. If I were able to chain these convolutions in such a way, things would run much quicker. The problem is obviously that accessing the registers of surrounding threads is not really possible. Furthermore, this would require threads to run in synch to make sure these intermediate values in between stages get calculated in the expected order.
In CUDA and OpenCL, these issues are very common, and are addressed by well-known barrier synchronization + shared memory tiling techniques, which in turn depend on the concept of CUDA thread blocks or OpenCL work groups. I believe these concepts are non-existent in RenderScript, as this issue is very much tied to the wildly different architectures between desktop-class GPU's and mobile SoC's.
So my obvious question here is, are such things possible in RenderScript? That is, better management of threads and possibly thread groups for quicker data sharing among them.
On the Google I/O 2013 RenderScript talk by Jason Sams and Tim Murray, it is discussed how Script Groups might be able to do some behind the scenes optimizations, such as cross-device parallelization, memory tiling, and kernel fusion; all this by analyzing at runtime the dependency DAG in the group, and either automatically creating allocations where needed or possibly optimizing them away. I'm assuming this last bit referes to fusing kernels so that they work off their own local data, kind of how I mentioned above keeping data in local registers and combining separate steps inside a single kernel.
All this seems very much in line with what I'm looking for, especially since my application is indeed a well-defined DAG of inter-dependent operations (for a Convolutional Neural Network). So if Script Groups are indeed a plausible mobile-centric alternative to these mechanisms, I'm wondering if there is any way of influencing how and where these optimizations happen. Or if not, how much can the runtime be trusted to make the correct inference from my data dependencies given the hardware its running on -- in the specific case of "surrounding" pixel data access of the convolutional algorithm.
I realize this might all still be work in pogress, and methods would be highly hardware dependent at this point. So if there is no straight solution for such matters at the present time -- I'd be very much willing to accept a speculative answer on how this kind of workflow might potentially be approached by RenderScript in future releases.
I'd be immensely grateful on some insight about this, as it would greatly affect the development direction of my own project going forward, not to mention there are surely many other people out there wondering how such general parallel computing tasks can be handled in RS.
Thank you very much!
As you've discovered, there's no way in RS to directly share data across threads. However, what you are describing can be done using a ScriptGroup. The catch is that each script in the group has to be unique, so you cannot feed your same script over and over. At least, not as it is written now. You could certainly put the "core" of your script in a RS header and include it from multiple kernels. The ScriptGroup allows you to have the output from one script become the input of another, or the output of one script becomes a global field in another. The documentation states that the kernel to kernel (output to input) is the more efficient use case. Using this approach, your synchronization issue would be resolved as the engine will execute the first script against the entire input data set before starting the second script, etc. The scripts themselves will be parallelized appropriately for the hardware (using either CPU or GPU/DSP). The engine will not have to pop back out to Java between scripts and can also manage the data allocations behind the scenes, if needed.
Something you may notice is the ScriptGroup utilizes Script.KernelID or Script.FieldID in order to identify the exact script or field in which to connect two kernels. Your custom scripts have these things auto-generated as long as you explicitly call out your kernel function using the RS compiler attribute pragma. Then you can call getKernelID_<name> (where 'name' is the kernel function name from your script) to get the kernel ID.

How to find total number instructions of a program?

I want to find the total number of machine instructions of an Android Application. I have explored the Debug.InstructionCount class of Android SDK, but I believe it provides info of Dalvik VM instructions (not the machine level instructions which actually executes on the processor).
I need this info to estimate the time required for the execution of an Android application on a particular processor (using fixed frequency). I am aware of the fact that different type of instructions take variable cycles due to which the computational time cannot be estimated accurately, but I still want to do some experimentation. Thank you
My solution involves writing an instruction set simulator, running the app and counting the instructions. There are already open source avr simulators out there than you can just use/modify for this.
At the end of the day in order to do this you have to follow the instruction flow, so either you actually sim it and that automatically solves how many times the code really goes through a loop and such, or you write a disassembler (which is half of a simulator) and basically follow the code flow in execution order (actually much simpler than a full disassembler or simulator) but you have to deal with all the possible code paths and loops as you find the different paths and count the different paths. With minimal work you could come up with the shortest possible path and know the code could never be faster than that.

How to record the activities of an android phone

I'm hoping to write a tweak to record all activities running on a rooted Android phone. For example, I want to record the information such as:
2012-07-31 15:03 app1:Activity01:onCreate()
2012-07-31 15:04 app1:Activity01:onStart()
...
2012-07-31 15:05 app1:Activity01:onPause()
2012-07-31 15:05 app2:Activity01:onResume()
Is is possible to do it? If so, please kindly tell me where to find the related information, books or domain knowledge I should study to accomplish this task. I'm new on Android programming but familiar with C++ and Java.
Thanks a lot!
Each Android app is executed in its own process running its own instance of the Dalvik VM. The VM normally does not provide the information you are looking for across process boundaries.
If you feel like really hacking your Android you could investigate into these two approaches:
Modify the Android API classes, basically building your own android.jar, where you can override and extend existing functionality.
Try to use the VM's debugging facility to gain access to its runtime state (see e.g. Dalvik VM debug monitor).
Bottomline: Rooting your phone is child's play compared to those hacks.
However, I would advise against trying to 'hook' into Android the way you described, both for performance and stability reasons.
So the answer was it ain't possible in a normal app, even on a rooted phone.
See comments :-)

Can an app be monitored for security?

A coworker and I were talking (after a fashion) about an article I read (HTC permission security risk). Basically, the argument came down to whether or not it was possible to log every action that an application was doing. Then someone (an abstract theroetical person) would go through and see if the app was doing what it was supposed to do and not trying to be all malicious like.
I have been programming in Android for a year now, and as far as I know if -- if -- that was possible, you would have to hack Dalvik and output what each process was doing. Even if you were to do that, I think it would be completely indecipherable because of the sheer amount of stuff each process was doing.
Can I get some input one way or the other? Is it completely impractical to even attempt to log what a foriegn application is doing?
I have been programming in Android for a year now, and as far as I know if -- if -- that was possible, you would have to hack Dalvik and output what each process was doing.
Not so much "hack Dalvik" but "hack the android.* class library, and perhaps a few other things (e.g., java.net).
Even if you were to do that, I think it would be completely indecipherable because of the sheer amount of stuff each process was doing.
You might be able to do some fancy pattern matching or something on the output -- given that you have determined patterns of inappropriate actions. Of course, there is also the small matter of having to manually test the app (to generate the output).
Is it completely impractical to even attempt to log what a foriegn application is doing?
From an SDK app? I damn well hope so.
From a device running a modded firmware with the aforementioned changes? I'd say it is impractical unless you have a fairly decent-sized development team, at which point it is merely expensive.
This is both possible and practical if you are compiling your own ROM. Android is based on Linux and I know several projects like this for Linux, like Linux Trace Toolkit. I also know of research into visualizing the results and detecting malicious apps from the results as well.
Another thing functionality like this is often used for is performance and reliability monitoring. You can read about the DTRACE functionality in Solaris to learn more about how this sort of stuff is used in business rather than academia.

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