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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T02:39:55+00:00

I have downloaded Android 4.0.1_r1 source. Upon decompressing the tar, the entire source code

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I have downloaded Android 4.0.1_r1 source. Upon decompressing the tar, the entire source code is around 9.21 GB in the disk.

The guideline in Google as quoted in http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html

Note: The source download is approximately 6GB in size. You will need 25GB free to complete a single build, and up to 90GB (or more) for a full set of builds.

Background Info
(my system) –
Intel i5 2 processors (4 core) , 8 GB RAM

My host system is Windows Server 2008 and I am trying to run Ubuntu 11.01 (64 bit) desktop with a memory 4GB allocated as Virtual Machine using Oracle Virtual Box. The disk space in the VM is currently around 50 GB.

These are my few small questions :-

  1. What is the difference between single build and “full set” of builds ?
  2. Based on the configuration shared , is it advised for me build Android 4 on a Ubuntu VM or should I consider installing Ubuntu on a separate primary partition with dual boot and start the build on a Ubuntu Host ?
  3. Are there any known recommended minimum system configuration to support building Android 4 or above as I have seen somewhere in the external forums that one requires 16 gigs of RAM to build android. I dont expect an exact to the point answer on this but some minimum quick pointers would do fine for me based on someone’s past build experience with Android 4 ICS.

Although it may appear as a duplicate question here , but the old question refers to previous versions of Android with much less source code.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    By single build / full set I guess they mean all the variants you can build (engineering build, userdebug, user, etc).

    RAM is a pretty serious issue when it comes to build time. Having said that, I’ve built ICS on a quad core (Intel Core 2 IIRC) with 4 GB RAM. It would take a couple of hours to build a single variant from scratch (with make -j4), and the computer would be pretty much unusable for other tasks in the meantime.

    I think an eight core CPU and 16 GB RAM is about as low as I’d want to go on the specifications if I was going to build Android on a regular basis (I’m currently using an eight core Xeon with 20 GB RAM, which has pretty decent build times).

    The disk space usage for the full repo with a single variant built is slightly more than 30 GB for me, but that will depend on exactly what you include in your build, so the 25 GB figure you mentioned doesn’t sound unreasonable.

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