How to edit emulator flags in Android Studio

I’ve recently updated to the new IntelliJ-based Android studio 2.1.

I ran into some issues attempting to launch a “hello world” project in the emulator, which I’m writing up here for the benefit of others.

For context, I run Debian GNU/Linux Jessie on an AMD64 box, with Radeon graphics card, using the free drivers.

The OpenGL error

When attempting to launch a simple project with the emulator, the emulator died with the following message:

Cannot launch AVD in emulator.
Output:
libGL error: unable to load driver: radeonsi_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: radeonsi
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
X Error of failed request:  GLXBadContext
  Major opcode of failed request:  155 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  6 (X_GLXIsDirect)
  Serial number of failed request:  49
  Current serial number in output stream:  48
libGL error: unable to load driver: radeonsi_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: radeonsi
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
X Error of failed request:  GLXBadContext
  Major opcode of failed request:  155 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  6 (X_GLXIsDirect)
  Serial number of failed request:  49
  Current serial number in output stream:  48
libGL error: unable to load driver: radeonsi_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: radeonsi
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
  Major opcode of failed request:  155 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  24 (X_GLXCreateNewContext)
  Value in failed request:  0x0
  Serial number of failed request:  33
emulator: WARNING: VM heap size set below hardware specified minimum of 228MB
emulator: WARNING: Setting VM heap size to 384MB
  Current serial number in output stream:  34
QObject::~QObject: Timers cannot be stopped from another thread

The console logs that the command being executed is:

/home/mike/Android/Sdk/tools/emulator -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd Nexus_5X_API_23

Fixing on the command-line

Quick list of things that didn’t work:

• Installing more libraries via apt-get
  apt-get install libstdc++6 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
• Pre-loading libraries
  LD_PRELOAD='/usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6' /home/mike/Android/Sdk/tools/emulator -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd Nexus_5X_API_23
• Attempting to understand LibGL’s debug output
  LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose /home/mike/Android/Sdk/tools/emulator -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd Nexus_5X_API_23

But the solution turned out to be this very specific flag:

$ ./emulator -help | grep libstdc++
    -use-system-libs               Use system libstdc++ instead of bundled one

So launching the emulator from the CLI worked for me, using this command:

/home/mike/Android/Sdk/tools/emulator -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd Nexus_5X_API_23 -use-system-libs

Fixing in the IDE

So this was fantastic progress, but without being able to launch this emulator from Android Studio, the development environment wasn’t really integrated yet.

Apparently there used to be a feature for adding command-line flags to the emulator, but this is now gone.

So, adapting a post here, I jumped in and replaced the emulator binary into a wrapper to inject some flags.

 $ cd ~/Android/Sdk/tools/
$ mv emulator emulator.0
$ touch emulator
$ chmod +x emulator

I then opened up the emulator in a text editor and punched in this:

#!/bin/sh
set -ex
$0.0 $@ -use-system-libs

Result

Success!