android-image-tools

Git repository to make it easier to build certain command line utilities provided by android-tools.

Motivation

Many Linux distributions have a package called android-tools which ships convenient android command line tools like mkbootimg or simg2img. Sadly the upstream build system for those tools is rather complex and doesn't allow building the command line tools only.

Linux Distribution therefore mostly ship their own build systems for building the command line utilities. This repository aims to make building of android command utilities easier by providing a simple CMake based build system and a ready-to-use tarball which doesn't require cloning all of the required git repositories manually. Besides this makes it easy to collect all patches required to build standalone android command line utilities in a central place.

This repository is a fork of android-tools, which only focus on the command line utilites useful for manipulating various android images.

This fork does not depend on googletest (aka gtest) or Go compiler. It also does not build adb and fastboot.

Status

Currently the following tools are supported:

• adb
• fastboot
• e2fsdroid, mke2fs.android, make_f2fs (required by fastboot)
• simg2img, img2simg, append2simg, ext2simg
• lpdump, lpmake, lpadd, lpflash, lpunpack
• mkbootimg, unpack_bootimg, repack_bootimg, avbtool
• mkdtboimg

The build system is originally took from android-tools, patches adding support for new tools in a clean way are welcome. Additionally, patches needed to make the software compile on other Linux distributions are welcome as well. Please create new patches using git format-patch --no-numbered --no-signature ….

Dependencies

The following libraries are required by android-tools:

1. libusb
2. PCRE
3. Google Test (Bundled)
4. protobuf
5. brotli
6. zstd
7. lz4
8. OpenSSL
9. zlib

Python 3 is optionally needed as a run-time dependency in order to use the mkbootimg, unpack_bootimg, and repack_bootimg scripts which are all written in Python.

Additionally the following software is required at compile-time:

1. A C and C++ compiler (either GCC >= 10.X or clang)
2. The Go compiler
3. CMake
4. Perl

Currently the build system doesn't check whether all of these are installed.

Installation

Source tarballs containing an already patched version of all vendored dependencies are available on the GitHub Release Page.

These tarballs should be used for packaging and general installation. After the tarball was downloaded and extracted android-tools can be build and installed as follows:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ make install

To build a statically linked binary (optional), pass -DPREFER_STATIC_LINKING=ON to CMake. Note that you will need to install the static versions of the depended libraries, otherwise you may see a configure / link error to occur.

Generating tarballs

New source tarballs can be created from the Git repository using:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make package_source

Before a new release is uploaded a new git-tag(1) should be created for the release. Afterwards the tarball can be uploaded to the GitHub Release Page.

See also

The build script for android platform tools by Anatol Pomozov which inspired this project. Most definitions in the CMakeLists.txt have been copied from Anatol's ruby script.