hugojosefson / android-emulator-wrapper

Wrapper for the Android Emulator, to work around `emulator -snapshot-list` causing segfault.

Android Emulator wrapper script

This wrapper for the Android Emulator executable works around an issue where emulator -snapshot-list causes a Segmentation Fault.

Background

This may for example happen when using Jenkins with the Android Emulator plugin.

The Jenkins plugin executes emulator -snapshot-list ... to find out whether to start from an existing snapshot or create one. Then emulator segfaults. The Jenkins plugin interprets that to mean there are no snapshots, and it should boot up the avd from scratch and create the first snapshot. This means it keeps re-creating a snapshot at every build, instead of creating it only once, and then reusing it.

I found an issue filed against the AOSP where one of the comments suggests that some of the different emulator-* executables segfault, and others do not, when supplied the -snapshot-list argument: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=34233#c57

Installation instructions

Find out where your emulator executable is located.

If it's a Jenkins server, look at the build log for complete path.

If it's your own developer machine, you can probably find it like this:

which emulator

In my case, on osx and having installed the Android SDK via brew, it's /usr/local/bin/emulator.

Rename the original emulator to emulator.bak in the same directory where it was. In my case:

mv /usr/local/bin/emulator{,.bak} 

Then chmod this wrapper, and copy into the original emulator's place:

chmod +x emulator
cp emulator /usr/local/bin/

It should now magically work!