Implementation of JVM tool interface on Dalvik virtual machine

Mobile devices such as cell phones, GPS guiding systems, and mp3 players, now become one of the most important consumer electronic products. Being an embedded system, mobile devices are highly integrated in software and hardware for robustness, high performance, and low cost. The problem is that this also makes it very difficult to understand the internal interactions of hardware as well as software modules in such devices and to identify performance bottlenecks and design faults. Profiling helps developers to understand the behaviors of a system, especially during the development of new platforms. Android is a new software platform intended for mobile devices. It is composed of Linux and a Java virtual machine called Dalvik. The ability to profile Android helps developers to familiarize with Android´s features and optimize their applications. In this paper, we discuss the development of a profiling tool interface, JVM TI, on Android. With this tool interface, developers can profile their Java code running on Dalvik using JVM TI.