Android NDK open() device permission denied

Question

In a native call, I'm trying to open("/dev/video4", O_RDWR) but I get errno EACCES 13 "permission denied".

If I run the same code* in an executable, on the same Android host, as the same UID of the installed app I'm running above, it works fine. (* minor differences like main() instead of Java_com_test_testOpen())

I've tried chmod 666 /dev/video4 and still get EACCES, which is especially strange.

Why does the same code, on the same host, as the same user, give EACCESS when called via JNI, and success when called as standalone executable?

The test device is rooted and running Cyanogenmod 12.1 (API 22) and I'm targeting >= API 21 (5.0 Lollipop) on rooted devices. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Since I'm building Cyanogenmod 12.1 (API 22) with other minor hacks I was able to get permissions for /dev/video* in my app by using the following hacks:

1. For standard Linux permissions, android.permission.CAMERA no longer seems to allow access to /dev/video* even though they're owned by system:camera. Instead, I edited device/samsung/klte-common/rootdir/etc/ueventd.qcom.rc and changed the /dev/video* line to 0666.
2. For SE Linux permissions, I added the line allow untrusted_app video_device:chr_file rw_file_perms; to external/sepolicy/untrusted_app.te.

After rebuilding and installing the image, my JNI lib is able to access /dev/video* and my client is happy!