Android NDK, Revision 7c

The Android NDK is a companion tool to the Android SDK that lets you buildperformance-critical portions of your apps in native code. It provides headers andlibraries that allow you to build activities, handle user input, use hardware sensors,access application resources, and more, when programming in C or C++. If you writenative code, your applications are still packaged into an .apk file and they still runinside of a virtual machine on the device. The fundamental Android application modeldoes not change.

Using native code does not result in an automatic performance increase, but always increases application complexity. If you have not run into any limitationsusing the Android framework APIs, you probably do not need the NDK. Read What is the NDK? for more information about whatthe NDK offers and whether it will be useful to you.

The NDK is designed for use only in conjunction with theAndroid SDK. If you have not already installed and setup the Android SDK, pleasedo so before downloading the NDK.

Platform	Package	Size	MD5 Checksum
Windows	android-ndk-r7c-windows.zip	80361003 bytes	e86184cdc4bf71d32fa9185fad8544e2
Mac OS X (intel)	android-ndk-r7c-darwin-x86.tar.bz2	73836512 bytes	025f57feb5f32ed993a5fa7f5996477d
Linux 32/64-bit (x86)	android-ndk-r7c-linux-x86.tar.bz2	63432410 bytes	0bc21b78823dcf6f86b988203626b1fe

Revisions

The sections below provide information and notes about successive releases ofthe NDK, as denoted by revision number.

Android NDK, Revision 7c (April 2012)

This release of the NDK includes an important fix for Tegra2-based devices, and a fewadditional fixes and improvements:

Important bug fixes:

• Fixed GNU STL armeabi-v7a binaries to not crash on non-NEON devices. The files provided with NDK r7b were not configured properly, resulting in crashes on Tegra2-based devices and others when trying to use certain floating-point functions (e.g., cosf, sinf, expf).

Important changes:

• Added support for custom output directories through the NDK_OUT environment variable. When defined, this variable is used to store all intermediate generated files, instead of $PROJECT_PATH/obj. The variable is also recognized by ndk-gdb.
• Added support for building modules with hundreds or even thousands of source files by defining LOCAL_SHORT_COMMANDS to true in your Android.mk.

  This change forces the NDK build system to put most linker or archiver options into list files, as a work-around for command-line length limitations. See docs/ANDROID-MK.html for details.

Other bug fixes:

• Fixed android_getCpuCount() implementation in the cpufeatureshelper library. On certain devices, where cores are enabled dynamically by the system, the previousimplementation would report the total number of active cores the first time the functionwas called, rather than the total number of physically available cores.