| THE ANDROID "QEMUD" MULTIPLEXING DAEMON |
| |
| I. Overview: |
| ------------ |
| |
| The Android system image includes a small daemon program named "qemud" |
| which is started at boot time. Its purpose is to provide a multiplexing |
| communication channel between the emulated system and the emulator program |
| itself. |
| |
| Its goal is to allow certain parts of the system to talk directly to the |
| emulator without requiring special kernel support; this simplifies a lot of |
| things since it does *not* require: |
| |
| - writing/configuring a specific kernel driver |
| - writing the corresponding hardware emulation code in hw/goldfish_xxxx.c |
| - dealing with device allocation and permission issues in the emulated system |
| |
| The emulator provides 'services' to various parts of the emulated system. |
| Each service is identified by a name and serves a specific purpose. For |
| example: |
| |
| "gsm" Used to communicate with the emulated GSM modem with |
| AT commands. |
| |
| "gps" Used to receive NMEA sentences broadcasted from the |
| emulated GPS device. |
| |
| "sensors" Used to list the number of emulated sensors, as well as |
| enable/disable reception of specific sensor events. |
| |
| "control" Used to control misc. simple emulated hardware devices |
| (e.g. vibrator, leds, LCD backlight, etc...) |
| |
| |
| II. Implementation: |
| ------------------- |
| |
| Since the "cupcake" platform, this works as follows: |
| |
| - A 'qemud client' is any part of the emulated system that wants to talk |
| to the emulator. It does so by: |
| |
| - connecting to the /dev/socket/qemud Unix domain socket |
| - sending the service name through the socket |
| - receives two bytes of data, which will be "OK" in case of |
| success, or "KO" in case of failure. |
| |
| After an OK, the same connection can be used to talk directly to the |
| corresponding service. |
| |
| |
| - The /dev/socket/qemud Unix socket is created by init and owned by the |
| 'qemud' daemon started at boot by /system/etc/init.goldfish.rc |
| |
| The daemon also opens an emulated serial port (e.g. /dev/ttyS1) and |
| will pass all messages between clients and emulator services. Thus, |
| everything looks like the following: |
| |
| |
| emulator <==serial==> qemud <---> /dev/socket/qemud <-+--> client1 |
| | |
| +--> client2 |
| |
| A very simple multiplexing protocol is used on the serial connection: |
| |
| offset size description |
| |
| 0 2 2-char hex string giving the destination or |
| source channel |
| |
| 2 4 4-char hex string giving the payload size |
| |
| 6 n the message payload |
| |
| Where each client gets a 'channel' number allocated by the daemon |
| at connection time. |
| |
| Note that packets larger than 65535 bytes cannot be sent directly |
| through the qemud channel. This is intentional; for large data |
| communication, the client and service should use a fragmentation |
| convention that deals with this. |
| |
| Zero-sized packets are silently discard by qemud and the emulator and |
| should normally not appear on the serial port. |
| |
| Channel 0 is reserved for control messages between the daemon and the |
| emulator. These are the following: |
| |
| - When a client connects to /dev/socket/qemud and sends a service |
| name to the daemon, the later sends to the emulator: |
| |
| connect:<service>:<id> |
| |
| where <service> is the service name, and <id> is a 2-hexchar string |
| giving the allocated channel index for the client. |
| |
| |
| - The emulator can respond in case of success with: |
| |
| ok:connect:<id> |
| |
| or, in case of failure, with: |
| |
| ok:connect:<id>:<reason> |
| |
| where <reason> is a liberal string giving the reason for failure. |
| It is never sent to clients (which will only receive a "KO") and |
| is used strictly for debugging purposes. |
| |
| - After a succesful connect, all messages between the client and |
| the corresponding emulator service will be passed through the |
| corresponding numbered channel. |
| |
| But if the client disconnects from the socket, the daemon will |
| send through channel 0 this message to the emulator: |
| |
| disconnect:<id> |
| |
| - If an emulator service decides, for some reason, to disconnect |
| a client, the emulator will send to the daemon (on channel 0): |
| |
| disconnect:<id> |
| |
| The daemon deals with this gracefully (e.g. it will wait that the |
| client has read all buffered data in the daemon before closing the |
| socket, to avoid packet loss). |
| |
| - Any other command sent from the daemon to the emulator will result |
| in the following answer: |
| |
| ko:bad command |
| |
| - Which exact serial port to open is determined by the emulator at startup |
| and is passed to the system as a kernel parameter, e.g.: |
| |
| android.qemud=ttyS1 |
| |
| |
| - The code to support services and their clients in the emulator is located |
| in android/hw-qemud.c. This code is heavily commented. |
| |
| The daemon's source is in $ROOT/development/emulator/qemud/qemud.c |
| |
| The header in $ROOT/hardware/libhardware/include/hardware/qemud.h |
| can be used by clients to ease connecting and talking to QEMUD-based |
| services. |
| |
| This is used by $ROOT/developement/emulator/sensors/sensors_qemu.c which |
| implements emulator-specific sensor support in the system by talking to |
| the "sensors" service provided by the emulator (if available). |
| |
| Code in $ROOT/hardware/libhardware_legacy also uses QEMUD-based services. |
| |
| |
| - Certain services also implement a simple framing protocol when exchanging |
| messages with their clients. The framing happens *after* serial port |
| multiplexing and looks like: |
| |
| offset size description |
| |
| 0 4 4-char hex string giving the payload size |
| |
| 4 n the message payload |
| |
| This is needed because the framing protocol used on the serial port is |
| not preserved when talking to clients through /dev/socket/qemud. |
| |
| Certain services do not need it at all (GSM, GPS) so it is optional and |
| must be used depending on which service you talk to by clients. |
| |
| |
| III. Legacy 'qemud': |
| -------------------- |
| |
| The system images provided by the 1.0 and 1.1 releases of the Android SDK |
| implement an older variant of the qemud daemon that uses a slightly |
| different protocol to communicate with the emulator. |
| |
| This is documented here since this explains some subtleties in the |
| implementation code of android/hw-qemud.c |
| |
| The old scheme also used a serial port to allow the daemon and the emulator |
| to communicate. However, the multiplexing protocol swaps the position of |
| 'channel' and 'length' in the header: |
| |
| offset size description |
| |
| 0 4 4-char hex string giving the payload size |
| |
| 4 2 2-char hex string giving the destination or |
| source channel |
| |
| 6 n the message payload |
| |
| Several other differences, best illustrated by the following graphics: |
| |
| emulator <==serial==> qemud <-+--> /dev/socket/qemud_gsm <--> GSM client |
| | |
| +--> /dev/socket/qemud_gps <--> GPS client |
| | |
| +--> /dev/socket/qemud_control <--> client(s) |
| |
| Now, for the details: |
| |
| - instead of a single /dev/socket/qemud, init created several Unix domain |
| sockets, one per service: |
| |
| /dev/socket/qemud_gsm |
| /dev/socket/qemud_gps |
| /dev/socket/qemud_control |
| |
| note that there is no "sensors" socket in 1.0 and 1.1 |
| |
| - the daemon created a de-facto numbered channel for each one of these |
| services, even if no client did connect to it (only one client could |
| connect to a given service at a time). |
| |
| - at startup, the emulator does query the channel numbers of all services |
| it implements, e.g. it would send *to* the daemon on channel 0: |
| |
| connect:<service> |
| |
| where <service> can be one of "gsm", "gps" or "control" |
| |
| (Note that on the current implementation, the daemon is sending connection |
| messages to the emulator instead). |
| |
| - the daemon would respond with either: |
| |
| ok:connect:<service>:<hxid> |
| |
| where <service> would be the service name, and <hxid> a 4-hexchar channel |
| number (NOTE: 4 chars, not 2). Or with: |
| |
| ko:connect:bad name |
| |
| |
| This old scheme was simpler to implement in both the daemon and the emulator |
| but lacked a lot of flexibility: |
| |
| - adding a new service required to modify /system/etc/init.goldfish.rc |
| as well as the daemon source file (which contained a hard-coded list |
| of sockets to listen to for client connections). |
| |
| - only one client could be connected to a given service at a time, |
| except for the GPS special case which was a unidirectionnal broadcast |
| by convention. |
| |
| The current implementation moves any service-specific code to the emulator, |
| only uses a single socket and allows concurrent clients for a all services. |
