Negative feedback was concentrated around the speed of
the emulator and debugging of the embedded systems (em-
ulator and mobile device). Students felt that the emulator
was too slow, and that debugging an embedded kernel was
overly complicated. Unfortunately, the speed of the emulator
is directly correlated to the speed of the laptop on which it is
run, and because the mobile device uses an ARM processor
the instruction set must be emulated which is a slow process.
In the future, as SMP support for ARM is integrated into
QEMU, and as laptop processor speeds increase, it should be
possible to speed up the emulator. Debugging an embedded
system is an inherently complicated task, and simplifying
the process is not easy. One approach to this problem is to
create more explicit and detailed instructions on the use of
Android and kernel level debugging techniques. such as the
use of /proc/last_kmsg which stores the kernel log message
buer of the last booted kernel and can be used to diagnose
the previous kernel crash. It also may be possible to provide
hardware-modied devices that expose either a JTAG con-
nection for low-level debugging, or a serial port for simplied
kernel debugging. The Google ADP1, for example, exposes
serial RX/TX pins on its ExtUSB connector.