The Raspberry Pi foundation announced today that its popular $35 Linux computer will soon be able to run Android 4.0. Google’s mobile operating system is being ported to the device by Broadcom developer Naren Sankar.
The Raspberry Pi foundation was originally founded in 2009 with the aim of building a low-cost computer that can be used to teach computer programming to young students. The organization’s $35 computer—a bare board that is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards—has a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It sparked considerable demand when it launched earlier this year.
Because the Raspberry Pi computer uses an ARM11 CPU instead of a chip based on the more ubiquitous ARMv7 architecture, software support is somewhat limited. Recent versions of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, for example, aren’t compatible. The Raspberry Pi foundation provides a special version of Fedora that is tailored to run on the device. There is also a specially optimized Debian port called Raspbian that is under development.
Android 4.0 could be a compelling option for some Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. According to the Raspberry Pi foundation, the Android port has support for hardware-accelerated graphics and video playback. Some features are still missing, however. It doesn’t yet support AudioFlinger, the Android sound system.
Sankar has published a YouTube video that demonstrates the port. It appears to work relatively well, though Android’s performance and responsiveness on the Raspberry Pi is obviously not as good as it would be on a higher-end device. Video playback appears smooth, however, due to the hardware acceleration.
The port currently uses its own customized Linux kernel rather than the version of the Linux kernel maintained by the Raspberry Pi foundation. The foundation says that it is working to converge the two and wants to bring them into alignment before publishing the source code.