modify system level/non-java code with ptrace as root?

[willcast]

It's a longshot but I think it'd be really useful and neat. SELinux would be an issue but I don't think it's insurmountable either.

Think of how useful it could be to shove things into the HAL code instead of having to do them from within the VM. It could also be a way to "support" ART.

[rovo89]

That sounds interesting. I don't have experience with ptrace though, so I'm not sure what it is capable of. Maybe it would allow for nicer ways to handle some internal stuff. I'm a bit worried about compatibility between ROMs though. For ART, this is probably not required.

That said - do you see any overlap of Xposed and your suggestion? To me, it sounds that there would be hardly any synergy effects by integrating this into Xposed. Modules would probably have to be written in C instead of Java, would have to be installed as .so files instead of APKs, would be managed differently, the initialization would take in a different process, the APIs would be distinct, ...

So maybe it would make more sense to put this into a separate project. Developing and maintaining Xposed is already very time-consuming, and targeting native code would be a big additional effort.

[willcast]

Now that I come to think of how it would all come together, probably so. If anything this would have to get pretty far on its own to be able to duplicate Xposed's functionality, and it'd probably be needless complexity.

[liudongmiao]

@willcast you can check cydia substrate, which declares to support native hook. However, I cannot install it on my device.

[rovo89]

As it's unlikely that something like this will ever be implemented in Xposed, I close this issue.