Intel released its development kit for Google Android 4.2.2 Jellybean Monday. The dev kit can also be dual-booted on a Windows 8 system.
The release was created by the company’s Open Source Technology Center to optimize the Android Open-Source Project to run on Intel machines. The project is called Android-IA, and the Intel-optimized version is now in the pre-alpha testing stage.
The Intel dev kit for 4.2.2 Jellybean will now allow developers to design, build and test apps meant for the Android OS on Intel hardware. The version, Android-4.2.2_r1-ia0, is based on upstream Google Android 4.2.2.
According to Phoronix, the Intel-optimized version of Jelly Bean includes:
- UEFI boot support. Gummiboot is also now used as the Android-IA bootloader instead of syslinux.
- Android-IA is now powered by the Linux 3.8 kernel.
- There's now an interactive installer and support for installing Android-IA alongside MicrosoftWindows 8 with dual-boot support.
- Upstream Mesa has been pulled into Android-IA, which is particularly important since Intel OTC wants a good Android experience when using their open-source Intel Mesa Linux driver.
- Support for signed kernel modules can be found within Android-IA.
- A unified installer for all platforms (excluding the except Samsung XE700t).
Intel hasn’t been great about releasing development kits for its hardware, but the company is getting better, and seems to be releasing something new every six months.
“We’ve been putting our releases for about six months now and we are starting to hit our stride,” Matt Gumbel, one of the Intel OTC developers for the Android-IA project, told Phoronix. “We just released a particularly cool feature: our installer is now capable of installing Android-IA side by side with a pre-existing Win8 installation.”
