Android Dalvik VM

Dalvik is the name of the Virtual Machine in which Android applications are run. This VM executes Dalvik bytecode, which is compiled from programs written in the Java language. Note that the Dalvik VM is not a Java VM (JVM).

Every Android application runs in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine.

At boot time, a single virtual machine, called 'zygote' is created, which preloads a long list of classes. (As of Android version 2.1 (eclair), the list of classes preloaded by zygote had 1,942 entries). All other "java" programs or services are forked from this process, and run as their own process (and threads) in their own address space. Both applications and system services in the Android framework are implemented in "java".

Dalvik was written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently. The Dalvik VM executes code in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format which is optimized for minimal memory footprint. The VM is register-based, and runs classes compiled by a Java language compiler that have been transformed into the .dex format by the included "dx" tool.

Most Android applications are delivered and stored on the system as packages (.apks), which include both dex bytes code (classes and methods) and resources. During first boot-up the system creates a cache of dex classes in /data/dalvik-cache.

JIT
As of version 2.2 (Froyo), Dalvik includes a Just-In-Time compiler (or JIT).


 * See A JIT Compiler for Android's Dalvik VM - video of presentation by Ben Cheng and Bill Buzbee at Google IO, 2010
 * Slides, in PDF

The Dalvik JIT, as of version 2.2, is a "trace-granularity JIT", which means that it compiles individual code fragments that it discovers at runtime to be "hot spots". (That it, it does not compile whole methods.) The Dalvik bytecode interpreter is constantly profiling the code it is executing, and when a piece of code is determined to be running a lot, it is passed to a compiler to turn into native code. Several optimizations may be performed in this process. This code is then executed instead of the bytecode, for future runs through this section of the software.

The memory overhead of the JIT is reported to be between 100K to 200K per application. The ratio of code size between native instructions and DEX byte codes in one example give (see slide 22 of the presentation) was 7.7 to 1. That is, native instructions take approximately 8 times as much space as DEX byte codes do to perform the same operations.

Relationship to Java
Because Dalvik is not referred to as a Java Virtual Machine it does not utilize the branding of "Java". Also, it does not execute Java bytecodes. Hence, Google can ignore licensing issues with Sun or Oracle, with regards to Java.

However, a Java compiler and set of class libraries are required in order to create a Dalvik program.

As of March 2010, only the Sun JDK, version 1.5 is supported for building the Android system and add-on Android applications.

Resources

 * Dalvik wikipedia entry


 * Dalvik VM Internals - video of presentation by Dan Bornstein at Google IO, 2008


 * DEX file format, reverse engineered by Michael Pavone
 * Dalvik bytecodes