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Hi I'm trying to find out about what the differences are in operating systems of mobile devices compared to those in desktop machines. Specifically things like memory management, scheduling etc.

I'm aware that mobile operating systems must need to do several other things like power management and worry about the smaller memory capacity.

Does anyone have any good resources to find out about the technical differences in mobile operating systems to their desktop counterpart and maybe specifically about android OS?

Mat
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Spawn
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4 Answers4

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At low level, Android has a different lightweight C standard library the bionic LibC. Instead of X11 it uses video framebuffer device. To make the OS lightweight on Android only a subset of POSIX standard is implemented.

zoli2k
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Have a good reading :) : http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html

ykatchou
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Depends how deep you want to go. Here you can find the desktop Linux kernel and here you can find the kernel and all other relevant Android source codes. I guess you can't get more technical than looking at the source code of both platforms.

Maybe one of them most interesting reads for you should be What is Android?

Octavian Helm
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  • I was hoping to find some articles comparing Mobile OS to Desktop OS. Specifically android to linux. I can't quite figure out what needs to be different in a mobile OS – Spawn Nov 22 '10 at 14:10
  • For example i've been reading about how mobile OS's don't page out to disk to create virtual memory, they just kill processes that don't need the memory – Spawn Nov 22 '10 at 14:12
  • To be honest I see no point in comparing those two things. They are meant to do totally different things. Android OS is in fact based on a modified Linux kernel. You can check it out looking at the source code. – Octavian Helm Nov 22 '10 at 14:17
  • There are very few functional differences between the normal linux kernel and an android one (I've actually booted ubuntu on an x86 android kernel). Android just adds a few extra interfaces and a network permission check. Most of the difference is in userspace. – Chris Stratton Nov 22 '10 at 16:52
  • Surely a mobile device has certain constraints that a desktop operating system does not? – Spawn Nov 22 '10 at 23:18
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Android vs. Linux as embedded OSes and Android is based on Linux are two good resources.

See also the major changes that Android made to the Linux kernel.

Dan Dascalescu
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