JNI Tips

What's JNI?

JNI is the Java Native Interface. It defines a way for code written in the Java programming language to interact with native code, e.g. functions written in C/C++. It's VM-neutral, has support for loading code from dynamic shared libraries, and while cumbersome at times is reasonably efficient.

You really should read through the JNI spec for J2SE 1.6 to understand how JNI works. Some aspects of the spec aren't immediately obvious on first reading, so you may find the next few sections handy. The more detailed JNI Programmer's Guide and Specification can be found here.

JavaVM and JNIEnv

JNI defines two key data structures, "JavaVM" and "JNIEnv". Both of these are essentially pointers to pointers to function tables. (In the C++ version, it's a class whose sole member is a pointer to a function table.) The JavaVM provides the "invocation interface" functions, which allow you to create and destroy the VM. In theory you can have multiple VMs per process, but Android's VMs only allow one.

The JNIEnv provides most of the JNI functions. Your native functions all receive a JNIEnv as the first argument.

On some VMs, the JNIEnv is used for thread-local storage. For this reason, you cannot share a JNIEnv between threads. If a piece of code has no other way to get a JNIEnv, you should share the JavaVM, and use JavaVM->GetEnv to discover the thread's JNIEnv.

The C and C++ definitions of JNIEnv and JavaVM are different. "jni.h" provides different typedefs depending on whether it's included into ".c" or ".cpp". For this reason it's a bad idea to include JNIEnv arguments in header files included by both languages. (Put another way: if your header file requires "#ifdef __cplusplus", you may have to do some extra work if anything in that header refers to JNIEnv.)

jclassID, jmethodID, and jfieldID

If you want to access an object's field from native code, you would do the following:

Similarly, to call a method, you'd first get a class object reference and then a method ID. The IDs are often just pointers to internal VM data structures. Looking them up may require several string comparisons, but once you have them the actual call to get the field or invoke the method is very quick.

If performance is important, it's useful to look the values up once and cache the results in your native code. Because we are limiting ourselves to one VM per process, it's reasonable to store this data in a static local structure.

The class references, field IDs, and method IDs are guaranteed valid until the class is unloaded. Classes are only unloaded if all classes associated with a ClassLoader can be garbage collected, which is rare but will not be impossible in our system. The jclassID is a class reference and must be protected with a call to NewGlobalRef (see the next section).

If you would like to cache the IDs when a class is loaded, and automatically re-cache them if the class is ever unloaded and reloaded, the correct way to initialize the IDs is to add a piece of code that looks like this to the appropriate class:

     * We use a class initializer to allow the native code to cache some
     * field offsets.

     * A native function that looks up and caches interesting
     * class/field/method IDs for this class.  Returns false on failure.
    native private static boolean nativeClassInit();
     * Invoke the native initializer when the class is loaded.
    static {
        if (!nativeClassInit())
            throw new RuntimeException("native init failed");

Create a nativeClassInit method in your C/C++ code that performs the ID lookups. The code will be executed once, when the class is initialized. If the class is ever unloaded and then reloaded, it will be executed again. (See the implementation of java.io.FileDescriptor for an example in our source tree.)

Local vs. Global References

Every object that JNI returns is a "local reference". This means that it's valid for the duration of the current native method in the current thread. Even if the object itself continues to live on after the native method returns, the reference is not valid. This applies to all sub-classes of jobject, including jclass and jarray. (Dalvik VM will warn you about this when -Xcheck:jni is enabled.)

If you want to hold on to a reference for a longer period, you must use a "global" reference. The NewGlobalRef function takes the local reference as an argument and returns a global one:

jobject* localRef = [...];
jobject* globalRef;
globalRef = env->NewGlobalRef(localRef);
The global reference is guaranteed to be valid until you call DeleteGlobalRef.

All JNI methods accept both local and global references as arguments.

Programmers are required to "not excessively allocate" local references. In practical terms this means that if you're creating large numbers of local references, perhaps while running through an array of Objects, you should free them manually with DeleteLocalRef instead of letting JNI do it for you. The VM is only required to reserve slots for 16 local references, so if you need more than that you should either delete as you go or use EnsureLocalCapacity to reserve more.

Note: method and field IDs are just 32-bit identifiers, not object references, and should not be passed to NewGlobalRef. The raw data pointers returned by functions like GetStringUTFChars and GetByteArrayElements are also not objects.

UTF-8 and UTF-16 Strings

The Java programming language uses UTF-16. For convenience, JNI provides methods that work with "modified UTF-8" encoding as well. (Some VMs use the modified UTF-8 internally to store strings; ours do not.) The modified encoding only supports the 8- and 16-bit forms, and stores ASCII NUL values in a 16-bit encoding. The nice thing about it is that you can count on having C-style zero-terminated strings, suitable for use with standard libc string functions. The down side is that you cannot pass arbitrary UTF-8 data into the VM and expect it to work correctly.

It's usually best to operate with UTF-16 strings. With our current VMs, the GetStringChars method does not require a copy, whereas GetStringUTFChars requires a malloc and a UTF conversion. Note that UTF-16 strings are not zero-terminated, so you need to hang on to the string length as well as the string pointer.

Don't forget to Release the strings you Get. The string functions return jchar* or jbyte*, which are pointers to primitive types rather than local references. They are not automatically released when the native method returns.

Primitive Arrays

JNI provides functions for accessing the contents of array objects. While arrays of objects must be accessed one entry at a time, arrays of primitives can be read and written directly as if they were declared in C.

To make the interface as efficient as possible without constraining the VM implementation, the Get<PrimitiveType>ArrayElements family of calls allows the VM to either return a pointer to the actual elements, or allocate some memory and make a copy. Either way, the raw pointer returned is guaranteed to be valid until the corresponding Release call is issued (which implies that, if the data wasn't copied, the array object will be pinned down and can't be relocated as part of compacting the heap).

You can determine whether or not the data was copied by passing in a non-NULL pointer for the isCopy argument. This is rarely useful.

The Release call takes a mode argument that can have one of three values. The actions performed by the VM depend upon whether or not the data was copied:

One reason for checking the isCopy flag is to know if you need to call Release with JNI_COMMIT after making changes to an array -- if you're alternating between making changes and executing code that uses the contents of the array, you can skip the no-op commit. Another possible reason for checking the flag is for efficient handling of JNI_ABORT. For example, you might want to get an array, modify it in place, pass pieces to other functions, and then discard the changes. If you know that JNI is making a new copy for you, there's no need to create another "editable" copy. If JNI is passing you the original, then you do need to make your own copy.

Some have asserted that you can skip the Release call if *isCopy is false. This is not the case. If no copy buffer was allocated, then the original memory must be pinned down and can't be moved by the garbage collector.

Also note that the JNI_COMMIT flag does NOT release the array, and you will need to call Release again with a different flag eventually.


You may not call most JNI functions when an exception is pending. Your code is expected to see the exception (via ExceptionCheck() or ExceptionOccurred()) and return, or clear the exception and handle it.

The only JNI functions that you are allowed to call while an exception is pending are listed here.

Note that exceptions thrown by interpreted code do not "leap over" native code, and exceptions through by native code don't longjmp back into the interpreter. The JNI Throw and ThrowNew instructions just set an exception pointer in the current thread. Upon returning from native code, the exception will be noted and handled appropriately.

Native code can "catch" an exception by calling ExceptionCheck or ExceptionOccurred, and clear it with ExceptionClear. As usual, discarding exceptions without handling them can lead to problems.

There are no built-in functions for manipulating the Throwable object itself, so if you want to (say) get the exception string you will need to find the Throwable class, look up the method ID for getMessage "()Ljava/lang/String;", invoke it, and if the result is non-NULL use GetStringUTFChars to get something you can hand to printf or a LOG macro.

Extended Checking

JNI does very little error checking. Calling SetFieldInt on an Object field will succeed. The goal is to minimize the overhead on the assumption that, if you've written it in native code, you probably did it for performance reasons.

Some VMs support extended checking with the "-Xcheck:jni" flag. If the flag is set, the VM puts a different table of functions into the JavaVM and JNIEnv pointers. These functions do an extended series of checks before calling the standard implementation.

Some things that may be verified:

Accessibility of methods and fields (i.e. public vs. private) is not checked.

The Dalvik VM supports the -Xcheck:jni flag. For a description of how to enable it for Android apps, see Controlling the Embedded VM. It's currently enabled by default in the Android emulator.

Native Libraries

You can load native code from shared libraries with the standard System.loadLibrary() call. The preferred way to get at your native code is:

For a simple example, see //device/tests/jnilibtest/JniLibTest.c and //device/apps/AndroidTests/src/com/android/unit_tests/JniLibTest.java.

You can also call System.load() with the full path name of the shared library. This is not recommended for Android apps, since the installation directory could change in the future.

Unsupported Features

All JNI 1.6 features are supported, with the following exceptions:

Copyright © 2008 The Android Open Source Project