Android Studio Release Updates: Emulator 28.1.8 Canary

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Emulator 28.1.8 Canary

Friday, February 22, 2019

Project Marble:

There are no direct improvements to CPU/RAM usage in this build, though there are the following compatibility and quality changes:

Headless emulator build. When using the emulator for CI, it can be hard to set up due to implicit expectations of the system being able to support Qt along with its shared library dependencies (among other issues).

As a first step to address this, we've introduced a variant of the emulator launcher plus QEMU executables that do not depend on Qt. On Linux, there is a remaining link to libX11, but we hope to remove that soon as well.
To use the headless emulator, run the emulator from the command line as usual, but replace the emulator binary invocation with emulator-headless. We also provide a review other command line options that can be useful for running in such an environment:
$ANDROID_SDK_ROOT/emulator/[emulator|emulator-headless] -avd avdName [-gpu [swiftshader_indirect|host]] [-no-snapshot[-save|-load]] [-read-only] [-no-accel] [-no-window]

emulator versus emulator-headless:

emulator: Run standard emulator with UI if possible. Qt libraries and their dependencies are linked.
emulator-headless: Run emulator without UI. Qt and its dependencies are not included. For now, only kernels on x86_64 and aarch64 are supported. Though, this should cover all x86 system images, x86_64 or not, back to API 27.

-gpu option:

swiftshader_indirect: Use Swiftshader software renderer, which is the most portable across setups.
host: If the machine has a hardware GPU accessible, use host.

-no-snapshot:

Cold boot and exit without saving a snapshot.

-no-snapshot-save:

Boot from the last snapshot, if any, but exit without saving a snapshot.

-no-snapshot-load:

Cold boot and save a snapshot on exit.

-read-only:

Boot from the last snapshot, if any, and allow multiple simultaneous invocations of the emulator launcher on the same AVD. No snapshots are saved on exit and changes to disk are discarded.

If booting from a snapshot, memory is also shared in a copy-on-write manner between AVD instances, which can save memory.

-no-accel:

This can be useful if the environment does not support virtualization which can be common in Jenkins environments.

-no-window:

This can be used in conjunction with the normal emulator launcher if Qt libraries are not an issue. Otherwise, run with emulator-headless; the behavior should be identical.

Quickboot regression fix. Fixed Quickboot not working with -no-window / headless mode.

Landscape frameless mask fix. Fixed wrong masking when frameless AVDs were booted with 'landscape' initial orientation.

Qt 5.12. Upgraded Qt libraries to Qt 5.12 LTS.