rsbinder

rsbinder is a pure Rust implementation of Binder IPC for Linux, Android, and macOS.

It offers two transports behind the same AIDL interfaces:

• Kernel binder — the /dev/binder driver on Linux and Android, with the same protocol and wire format as Android libbinder, so rsbinder talks directly to existing Android services written in C++ or Java.
• RPC transport — binder over Unix, vsock, or TLS sockets, with no kernel driver and no root. Wire-compatible with Android libbinder RPC, verified against real libbinder on Android 13–16.

If you'd rather use C++ on Linux, see binder-linux.

Crates

• rsbinder — the binder library: services, clients, parcels, async.
• rsbinder-aidl — AIDL → Rust code generator.
• rsbinder-macros — #[rsbinder::interface]: declare an interface as a Rust trait, without .aidl.
• rsbinder-fmq — Android's Fast Message Queue (libfmq), independent of binder.
• rsbinder-tools — rsb_hub (service manager for Linux), rsb_device, rsb_service.

Features

• Kernel binder and RPC transport, chosen at run time by a Uri (rsbinder::serve, rsbinder::connect).
• AIDL compiler compatible with Android's, and interface macros that generate the same code.
• Sync and Tokio async APIs.
• ParcelFileDescriptor, shared memory (IMemory), Fast Message Queue and streaming.
• Storing AIDL values to bytes (to_bytes / from_bytes).
• Service manager for Linux (rsb_hub) with access control and on-demand start.

Platform Support

Parcel data is little-endian on every host, as on Android.

Getting Started

RPC transport (no kernel config, no root):

$ cargo run -p example-hello --features rpc --bin rpc_hello_service
$ cargo run -p example-hello --features rpc --bin rpc_hello_client

Kernel binder needs binderfs (CONFIG_ANDROID_BINDERFS=y; Arch Linux linux-zen has it, for Ubuntu see Enable Binder on Ubuntu):

$ cargo build
$ sudo target/debug/rsb_device binder --group "$(id -gn)" --mode 0660
$ cargo run --bin rsb_hub -- --insecure-allow-all
$ cargo run --bin hello_service
$ cargo run --bin hello_client

Android: build with cargo-ndk for API 29 or newer:

$ cargo ndk -t aarch64-linux-android --platform 29 build --release

Documentation

The rsbinder book covers installation, AIDL, the RPC transport, Android compatibility and migration between releases. API reference is on docs.rs.

rsbinder is pre-1.0. Each public API is classified Stable, Provisional or Experimental; see Stability Tiers.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Notice

Many source files in rsbinder were developed by quoting or referencing Android's binder implementation.