There is a very amazing part of Android Operating system
named as zygote android. Well if you have been an employee of android before
then you must have worked on running the ps command and should have seen that
all the applications of android have the same parent PID or say PPID. A very
different approach is used by android to start a process and to ensure that the
application startup is snappy. This whole process is named as ZYGOTE and all the android applications
are derived from it.
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| Zygote Android Virus |
Why Zygote?
Every process in android starts by forking the parent
process which then goes through numerous setup steps and this also includes
loading of libraries and resources. This
process consumes a lot of time and is very hard to notice on our desktops. This
process setup is noticeable to the end users and also not all devices are of
high spec in case of Android. Therefore to normalize the process, startup time
on various devices starts the Android cold process during OS startup because of
it only the applications are forked whenever required. This full process is
called as Zygote in Android.
Zygote Startup?
The Android device is kept to switch on mode and after all the booting process the init system starts the process and runs the /init.rc file to setup various environment variables, mount points and start native daemons etc. During the execution of init.rc this is the time when the Zygote is started.The initialization of Zygote can be easily simplified into following steps:
1.
Register Zygote socket (listens for connections on
/dev/socket/zygote) for requests to start new apps.
2.
Preloads resources.
3.
Preloads all java classes.
4.
Opens the socket.
5.
Starts the system server (not covered in this post).
6.
Listens to the connections.
