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fouric
Asked: 2013-03-26 17:26:20 +0800 CST

What are bionic and libhybris?

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In reading about Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu for Android, I have noticed references to "bionic" and "libhybris" that are made fairly often.

I assume that libhybris is a library because of the "lib" prefix, but that's about all I know.

What are bionic and libhybris, and what do they do?

Edit: @maggotbrain asked if I could link to some of the sources where I found mention of bionic/libhybris. Here is a comment on Hacker News, and here is another. Those are the only ones that I could find, what really got me wondering was when someone mentioned it at an Ubuntu LoCo meeting.

ubuntu-touch

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Bionic, according to wikipedia:

    The Bionic libc is a derivation of the BSD standard C library code that was originally developed by Google for the Android embedded operating system

    If you are wondering what the C standard library is, it's a library that all applications written in C use. It contains input and output functions (e.g. printing to a terminal, writing/reading a file, etc...), memory functions (allocating/freeing), etc... Note that the C standard library is actually just a specification for a library (same as OpenGL, and some others), it's not actually a library that you can download and use. This is why there are implementations such as the BSD's (I'll call it the BSD libc, for convenience), GNU's (which, by the way, is included by default in ubuntu, under the name of libc), or, in this case, Bionic. But as wikipedia said, Bionic is based off of the BSD libc, so it's not an original implementation. Now about the actual implementation, I'm not sure what's the difference between Bionic and the BSD libc, but I would think it has something to do with compatability of their devices, or something along the likes of that (since one of the reasons why the C standard library is just a specification is that how the functions work differ from OS to OS).

    libhybris is an extension, if you want, to bionic that acts like libdl (source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE5Mjk). If you're wondering what libdl is, it's a library that allows applications to dynamically load other libraries into their applications. This is extremely useful (if not impossible to do without) for plugins and such.

    Hope this clarifies!

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