Amniote: A User Space Interface to the Android Runtime

Zachary Yannes, Gary Tyson

2019

Abstract

The Android Runtime (ART) executes apps in a dedicated virtual machine called the Dalvik VM. The Dalvik VM creates a Zygote instance when the device first boots which is responsible for sharing Android runtime libraries to new applications. New apps rely heavily on external libraries in addition to the runtime libraries for everything from graphical user interfaces to remote databases. We propose an extension to the Zygote, aptly named Amniote, which exposes the Zygote to the user space. Amniote allows developers to sideload common third-party libraries to reduce application boot time and memory. Just like the Android runtime libraries, apps would share the address to the library and generate a local copy only when one app writes to a page. In this paper, we will address three points. First, we will demonstrate that many third-party libraries are used across the majority of Android applications. Second, execution of benchmark apps show that most page accesses are before copy-on-write operations, which indicates that pages from preloaded classes will infrequently be duplicated. Third, we will provide a solution, the Amniote framework, and detail the benefits over the traditional Zygote framework.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Yannes Z. and Tyson G. (2019). Amniote: A User Space Interface to the Android Runtime.In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-375-9, pages 59-67. DOI: 10.5220/0007715400590067

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase19,
author={Zachary Yannes and Gary Tyson},
title={Amniote: A User Space Interface to the Android Runtime},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2019},
pages={59-67},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007715400590067},
isbn={978-989-758-375-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Amniote: A User Space Interface to the Android Runtime
SN - 978-989-758-375-9
AU - Yannes Z.
AU - Tyson G.
PY - 2019
SP - 59
EP - 67
DO - 10.5220/0007715400590067