The Android SDK has a device emulator. \u00c2\u00a0I use it in Eclipse with the Android JUnit test framework. \u00c2\u00a0A few days ago, the emulator refused to start.<\/p>\n
From Window -> AVD Manager, I started one of the devices. \u00c2\u00a0A dialog titled “Starting Android Emulator” came up. \u00c2\u00a0Inside it, a progress bar ticked off ten seconds. \u00c2\u00a0Then, nothing. \u00c2\u00a0This behavior was the same for all my devices, from Android version 1.5 through version 4.0.3.<\/p>\n
To see if the problem was related to Eclipse, I started the emulator from the command line. \u00c2\u00a0To do this, you need the name of the AVD:<\/p>\n
android list avd<\/pre>\nUsing my Android 1.5 virtual device, I tried to start it:<\/p>\n
emulator -avd OldAndroid<\/pre>\nAnd the result was “Segmentation fault”. \u00c2\u00a0I turned on “verbose” and ran again:<\/p>\n
emulator -verbose -avd OldAndroid<\/pre>\nThis prints out what’s happening. \u00c2\u00a0The last line before the seg fault was: \u00c2\u00a0“emulator: Initializing hardware OpenGLES emulation support”. \u00c2\u00a0Next, I tried to see which system call failed:<\/p>\n
strace emulator -avd OldAndroid<\/pre>\nThe last line there is a futex call with operation FUTEX_WAIT and no timeout. \u00c2\u00a0This call was unfinished, resulting in the seg fault. \u00c2\u00a0From the manual page for futex: \u00c2\u00a0“This operation atomically verifies that the futex address uaddr still contains the value val,\u00c2\u00a0and sleeps awaiting FUTEX_WAKE on this futex address.” \u00c2\u00a0The address appears in the lines above.<\/p>\n