kati is an experimental GNU make clone. The main goal of this tool is to speed-up incremental build of Android.

Currently, kati does not offer a faster build by itself. It instead converts your Makefile to a ninja file.

Now AOSP has kati and ninja, so all you have to do is

% export USE_NINJA=true

All Android's build commands (m, mmm, mmma, etc.) should just work.

Set up kati:

% cd ~/src
% git clone https://github.com/google/kati
% cd kati
% make

Build Android:

% cd <android-directory>
% source build/envsetup.sh
% lunch <your-choice>
% ~/src/kati/m2n --kati_stats  # Use --goma if you are a Googler.
% ./ninja.sh

You need ninja in your $PATH.

% ./ninja.sh -t clean

Note ./ninja.sh passes all parameters to ninja.

For example, the following is equivalent to "make cts":

% ./ninja.sh cts

Or, if you know the path you want, you can do:

% ./ninja.sh out/host/linux-x86/bin/adb