Project Marble:
- Added ADB scripts to increase screen-off timeout to INT_MAX milliseconds (~24 days). This is, again, to address high emulator usage at idle. Here is the breakdown:
- To recap, the most significant source of spinning fans when the emulator is seemingly idle, is tasks started by GMScore shortly after cold boot, plus heavy levels of app updates where the user's entire machine is pegged from installing updated apps in the background.
- The emulator typically defaults to being on emulated AC charging. This seems to be the top contributor to this heavy level of background activity, especially on Google APIs / Play images with GMScore. Apps download and update all the time, sometimes bringing the guest down to 0% idle for extended periods.
- If we go to the Extended Controls > Battery page and set the emulator to be without the AC charger ("None" setting) and set the emulator to "Not charging", this greatly decreases background activity.
- However, if the emulator is on battery power, the screen can turn off by itself, which is undesirable.
- Because of this, we've changed the emulator to send an ADB command to increase the screen off timeout to INT_MAX milliseconds (~24 days). This allows users to put the emulator on battery power for a better experience due to lower background activity.
- The exact command is:
- adb shell settings put system screen_off_timeout 2147483647
- However, we cannot also put the emulator on battery mode by default right away, due to the possibility of the adb command being dropped and causing unintended screen off events for users.
- We plan to address this fully by releasing system images with the screen-off timeout setting baked in, so the emulator can safely default to battery mode.
- Snapshots: On snapshot load, the guest clock is now immediately updated to the current time.
- UI: Divider lines in the keyboard shortcuts table have been restored.
- Compressed ETC2/EAC texture support: Our compressed texture emulation now passes all dEQP tests for ETC2/EAC images, allowing Vulkan apps that use compressed ETC2/EAC textures to run on without requiring native support for ETC2/EAC on the host GPU. See 28.1.6 release notes for the current way to get started with Vulkan.