<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi,<br><br>The Android mobile device platform uses the Linux kernel, but doesn't <br>use sockets or signals for inter-process communication. It uses a <br>system called Binder (which used to be called OpenBinder[1]). Through <br>a complex system of smoke, mirrors and ioctls this makes certain local <br>procedure calls actually take place in other processes.<br><br>The patch at this address[2] adds some support to strace for decoding <br>these ioctls.<br><br>The patch is, to be honest, rubbish. It is two years old and was based <br>on partial documentation and a lot of guesswork. The output format is <br>verbose due to the sheer amount of information conveyed in these <br>Binder ioctls. I suspect some of the information reported may be <br>invalid, as I wasn't sure about the lifetimes of the memory buffers <br>referred to. Irrespective, it's probably not up to the coding <br>standards required for the main strace codebase.<br><br>But, for anyone who later wants to add Binder support to strace <br>properly, it would be a good start. I am unlikely to make any progress <br>on the patch in the foreseeable future, hence posting to the list now <br>in case anyone else wants to have a go. Then again, any comments are <br>welcome - if anyone thinks that it would be worthwhile to incorporate <br>it into strace almost as-is, please do give me a critique of the patch <br>and I'll spruce it up.<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>Adrian<br><br>[1] <a href="http://www.angryredplanet.com/~hackbod/openbinder/docs/html/index.html">http://www.angryredplanet.com/~hackbod/openbinder/docs/html/index.html</a><br>[2] <a href="http://www.macrobug.com/opensource/strace/mb-strace-4.5.15-patch-2513.diff">http://www.macrobug.com/opensource/strace/mb-strace-4.5.15-patch-2513.diff</a><br><br><div>PS this mail is a resend; the first one bounced. Apologies if anyone gets two copies.</div><div><br>--<br>Adrian Taylor, Macrobug Ltd. +44 7779 723608<br>A company registered in England and Wales no 5892155, 352 Mill Road, <br>Cambridge CB1 3NN<br>VAT reg. GB 892 4122 21. <a href="http://www.macrobug.com/">http://www.macrobug.com/</a><br></div></body></html>