Gadgetory

hello there i'm gary sims from android authority now as you probably know Android uses the leanest kernel it has done since the very beginning for that poses the question is Android just Linux on a mobile phone on a smartphone and of course the answer is yes well actually no maybe let me explain okay so at the heart of every operating system there is a kernel and the kernel is responsible for managing the resources of the hardware the memory the files and so on now I've got a whole video what is a kernel and I really recommend you go and watch that if you need to know more details about the role of Linux on mobile on the desktop and in the servers now androids need a kernel and the kernel it uses is a Linux kernel now the problem is when it comes to asking the question is Android just Linux is that Linux actually means different things to different people are at this point I'm going to just interrupt and say about the pronunciation Linux Linux I say Linux deal with it now basically if you say oh my laptop running Linux what you probably mean is running a Linux distribution which means it's a Linux kernel and then a whole bunch of other tools on top of it including the command line stuff including compilers including a desktop including applications that come bundled with that distribution of Linux if we're talking in the purest term Linux is just the Colonel Burton Linux kernel and that's the thing that Linus tour build wrote and that is why it has that name Linus Linux that's where it comes from and there's also this idea of this thing called GNU Linux because Linux as a kernel is great but it's actually completely useless unless there are some tools on top of it even a simple shell that you can actually just type in a few things requires some of these other external tools that Linus didn't write at the C compiler which you need to compile Linux and so on and they are all part of what's called the new tool chain so some people like to call it good news flash Linux personally I don't like that idea because actually on desktop we also use a desktop environment KDE or gnome where you think like web browsers so should it be called good news slash Chrome slash gnome / Cadiz lettuce that doesn't make any sense but the understanding is that Linux is just the kernel and a kernel needs user space tools to make it usable by everyday users so if you're wondering is Android just Linux well it depends on what you mean by Linux so here's a couple of reasons why we could say yes it is Linux first of all cause it uses the Linux kernel so when you boot up an Android phone is booting up the Linux kernel a same or very similar kernel as what you would get on desktops or on servers now to say something is Linux would mean it would be compatible with Linux on other systems and to do a test what I actually did was I took a Raspberry Pi one and I wrote some C code and I statically linked it and I copied that binary it ran on the Raspberry Pi one printed out what it meant to print out I then took exactly the same binary I copied it over to an Android phone and I ran it via the ADB tools and the same binary ran on my Android phone with no alteration then gave me the correct output in fact was even able to take the golang programming language from google compiler program of golang on a Raspberry Pi one on v6 architecture copying exactly the same binary over to an arm v8 64 bit Android smartphone and the same binary ran so in that way is Linux is certainly not win the who's it's certainly not iOS and certainly not the kernel you find in in Mac OS and it ran but everything you need to do printing things out and everything finding out system information it ran on whatever so in that case Android is Linux but by the same argument Android isn't Linux because for example I did a special thing when I compile those programs I use static linking now static linking basically means that when everything that's need for that program running is built inside of the binary itself now normally on most modern operating systems that you dynamic link which means the same code doesn't need to be copied again in the game Gators the code to concatenate two strings together doesn't need to be included in every single binary but on our system is a library that contains that information in fact it contains loads and loads of functions and functionality that a program might need to do with files and do with your printing system and to do with threads and to do with everything memory allocation everything you could possibly want and basically when a program runs up it starts it has AI li dis library this library need this library for me to run that's what the DLL czar in kind of the windows area now basically if you run own or if you compile a normal program or a Raspberry Pi and copy over to an Android phone won't run because all those deals or that runtime isn't there in fact standard Linux distributions use the GNU C library for its runtime and basically on Android Google write with own C library called Bionic and they're not compatible with each other you binary compatible you can't take an executable from one and copy it onto the other and expect bionics to do the same thing as Dipsy and actually it screwed the other way around you can't take an app from a Android smartphone and copy it over to your desktop and run it and it just works that doesn't happen but having said that of course if you've got Chrome OS which is basically limit with the web browsers stuff built on top you've got a modern version of Chrome OS but of course it can run angular applications so you can actually take a nap down in from the place where in fact and run it on your your Chromebook and I've done that recently on my my Chromebook cause it just became available for it so in that sense you can run android apps on linux and you can run Linux binaries on auto but the point of course here is that Android has its own stack its own functions all that stuff to do with the Java and the java virtual machine and how windows are opened and how applications work and fragments and intents and all the things that make up you know android apps has to be built into Linux distributions somehow including Chrome OS or using some emulator to get to work so at that level a Linux and Android are actually two separate operating systems based on the same core technology which of course is the Linux kernel so what does that all mean well it depends on how you are defined in it yes they both Linux a desktop and Linux server and an Android phone use the Linux kernel the new libraries that are there are not available on Android but they are available on Linux vionic the C runtime library for Android is not what you get standard on Linux see that the desktop chromium the Firefox the browser's everything you want or you don't get on on Android of course Android had its own stuff it has well in frameworks at own operating system it has own way of doing things as a java virtual machine it has all the stuff that we use to build apps and that isn't included in a standard Linux distribution but if you're running Chrome OS then you can have that stuff because they've brought it over from Android over to a Linux distribution so what can we say here's my kind of my definitive opinion yes they both use Linux as a user Linux kernel no they're not both GNU Linux in any sense whatsoever because Android is certainly not good news Linux and thirdly you could continue to be a Linux distribution if it means an operating system that is created with Linux of the core and then a whole bunch of other stuff built on top well that is what Android is and that is what anything like red hat or CentOS or Ubuntu or whatever that's what that is but their aims and their goals and what they're doing are different at some point you lose compatibility between the two personally I think is great that our Android smartphones are using the open source Linux kernel I've been a follower of Linux for since before version 1 of Linux and I think it's great that we can run this technology on our modern-day smartphones so I'm going to try and aura tea I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up I'd love to hear from you in the comments is Android Linux yes or no don't start flame wars but let's just talk about it because that will be really interesting please don't forget to subscribe to Android YouTube channel and do go over to Android 40 calm because we are your source all things Android