1306490 - Blank (white) content for all web pages in latest version of Android emulator

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: Android Studio and Gradle Integration, defect)

Description

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

As noted in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1303008#c4, we are starting to see no content in web pages when run on the Android emulator. That case seems to be running the emulator from Android Studio on OSX. I see the same problem with 'mach android-emulator' on Ubuntu 16.

This seems to affect old Fennec (~49.0) builds as well, even though we just started noticing this. Explanation: The Android emulator changed. 

If I downgrade my emulator to the one distributed with the 24.0.2 sdk, the problem disappears and pages are rendered correctly.

Comment 1

[:Grisha Kruglov]

As I mentioned in Bug 1303008, I can get around this (running on Fedora 24) by disabling graphics hardware rendering in emulator's settings (via the AVD Manager). With Software-backed rendering (in avd manager's lingo), things seem to run well enough, albeit none-insignificantly slower.

Comment 2

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

Thanks. And to use the 4.3 avd set up with 'mach android-emulator', it is possible to use:

$ export ANDROID_AVD_HOME=~/.mozbuild/android-device/avd
$ emulator -gpu swiftshader -avd mozemulator-4.3

Comment 3

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

Attachment: use '-gpu swiftshader' when starting emulator from mach

Adding '-gpu swiftshader' seems necessary to avoid this problem when running firefox in a new emulator. Older versions of the emulator may complain or even fail with the new option, but I don't have an easy way of checking for compatibility, I expect anyone building firefox for android will have been auto-upgraded to a new emulator, and it is easy to resolve any compatibility problems by simply updating the sdk/emulator.

Comment 4

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

Comment on attachment 8799906 [details] [diff] [review]
use '-gpu swiftshader' when starting emulator from mach

Review of attachment 8799906 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

any concerns with in automation vs locally (i.e. mach)?

Comment 5

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

Tests run from mozharness will continue to use the old emulator and will not use the new option. As long as the sdk/emulator used for local builds is a moving target, I think there will always be a difference between automation and mach. Thankfully, it seems there is not much functional difference between emulator versions.

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/9199fb5b105b
Use '-gpu swiftshader' when starting android emulator from mach; r=jmaher

Comment 7

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/9199fb5b105b

Comment 8

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

FYI for me this broke the emulator: I get this in emulator.log:

<ERROR: Invalid GPU mode 'swiftshader', use one of: on off host guest mesa>

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS if that makes any difference.

Comment 9

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

Sorry about that!

The issue is that your emulator is too old. An update of your Android sdk should make it work -- running 'mach bootstrap' should do the trick.

Comment 10

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Geoff Brown [:gbrown] from comment #9)
> The issue is that your emulator is too old. An update of your Android sdk
> should make it work -- running 'mach bootstrap' should do the trick.

Tried 'mach bootstrap', now I'm running into bug 1307314. :/

Comment 11

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Attachment: emulator.log

After working around bug 1307314, I did a clean build and the emulator still fails to start up. I'm attaching the emulator.log output.

Comment 12

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

For some reason, kats was stuck on Android SDK Tool 24.0.1. He manually updated to Android SDK Tools 25.2.2 and updated his avd with 'mach android-emulator --force-update' -- and the emulator is working for him now.

Comment 13

[Dana Keeler (she/her) [:keeler]]

For the record, I did a clean clone/mach bootstrap and ran into exactly the same problem in comment 8. Is mach bootstrap installing the right version of the emulator?

Comment 14

[Dana Keeler (she/her) [:keeler]]

Ah - interesting twist. I was attempting to use artifact builds, but I needed to do a full build, so I re-ran mach bootstrap with a non-artifact setup, and it seems to have installed the most recent emulator.

Comment 15

[Dana Keeler (she/her) [:keeler]]

Oh, no, I lied. It didn't. (Sorry for the bugspam.)