Android software stack is subdivided into five parts: Applications, Application Framework, Libraries, Android Runtime, and the Linux Kernel.
Figure 1: Structure of the Android OS
Kernel
The kernel is the core of the operating system. Androids kernel is built off of the Linux 2.6 kernel with some architectural modifications which are implemented by google outside the usual linux kernel development cycle. Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel, meaning that most of the operating system is found in the kernel space, such as device drivers, kernel extensions. This result in very large source code.
The Linux Kernel is what interacts with the hardware and contains all device drivers used by higher levels of the software stack to control and communicate with the hardware. Such drivers are the Display Driver, Camera Driver, Flash Memory Driver, Audio Driver e.t.c
The kernel is modified for special needs in mobile devices such as power management, memory management and the runtime management.
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