{"id":868,"date":"2015-09-23T19:38:21","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T02:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/?p=868"},"modified":"2015-09-23T19:38:21","modified_gmt":"2015-09-24T02:38:21","slug":"accelerating-android-app-debugging-with-virtualbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/tutorials\/android\/virtualbox\/","title":{"rendered":"Accelerating Android App debugging with VirtualBox"},"content":{"rendered":"

This tutorial shows how to use VirtualBox<\/a> to accelerate debugging of Android apps with native components. We will show how to create an Android VirtualBox VM, configure it for debugging and use VisualGDB to debug the San-Angeles project. Before you begin, download the latest VirtualBox and get an x86 Android ISO from the android-x86.org<\/a> website.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Install and run VirtualBox. Click the “New” button to create a new VM:\"01-virtualbox\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Select “Linux -> Other Linux (32-bit)” as the machine type:\"02-android\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Proceed with the default memory size:\"03-memory\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Select “Create a virtual hard disk now”:\"04-makedisk\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Proceed with the default virtual disk format:\"05-disktype\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. On the next page select “dynamically allocated”:\"06-dynamic\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  7. Finally you can customize the disk size. The default value of 8GB should be enough for most cases:\"07-makedisk\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  8. Before you can start installing the Android OS into your VM, you need to mount the ISO file in it. Click “Settings” to open the VM settings:\"08-settings\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  9. Go to the “Storage” tab, select the empty CD-ROM device and click the disc icon to browse for a disc image:\"09-disk\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  10. Specify the path to the Android image you downloaded. It will appear in the Settings window:\"10-androidimg\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  11. Go to the network settings and select either Host-only adapter (if you don’t have a local DHCP server) or Bridged mode (if your network has a DHCP server):\"10a-network\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  12. Finally press OK to save the settings and start the VM:\"11-start\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  13. In the boot menu select “Installation” and press Enter:\"12-bootmenu\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  14. Wait until the Android OS boots:\"13-boot\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  15. Select “Create\/modify partitions”:\"14-partition\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  16. Select “New” to create a new partition:\"15-new\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  17. Select “Primary” to create a partition that can be used to store a bootable OS:\"16-primary\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  18. Proceed with the size suggested by the partition utility. By default the new partition will cover the entire disk:\u00a0 \"17-size\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  19. Select the “Bootable” button and press Enter to mark the partition as bootable:\"18-boot\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  20. Finally select “Write” and press Enter to save the partition table to the disk:\"19-write\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  21. Type “yes” and press Enter to confirm the write:\"20-yes\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  22. Now you can select the newly created partition in the partition list and press OK:\"21-sda1\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  23. Choose to format it with the ext3 filesystem:\"22-ext3\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  24. Confirm the format operation:\"23-format\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  25. Choose “Yes” to install the boot loader so that you can boot into the operating system:\"24-grub\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  26. Choose to make the system directory writable as this will allow fixing permission bug described later:\"25-rw\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  27. The Android OS will now be installed. Once the installation completes, choose “Reboot”:\"26-reboot\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  28. To avoid booting into the installer again, open VM properties and remove the virtual CD-ROM device:\"17-remove\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  29. Once the OS boots, select your language and press the button to the right to continue: \"27-english\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  30. If you cannot see the mouse pointer, try toggling the mouse integration in the Input menu:\"28-mouseint\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  31. Skip the WiFi selection as we will be using a virtual network adapter anyway:\"29-skipwifi\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  32. Enter the user name that will be associated with your virtual OS installation:\"30-demouser\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  33. Now the installation is complete and you can finally start using your OS. It is recommended to create a VM snapshot at this point so that you can return to it later if something breaks:\"31-desktop\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  34. Open the Terminal app from the apps list and run the following commands to fix the run-as permission bug and determine the current IP address:\n
    ifconfig eth0\r\nsu\r\nchmod 4750 \/system\/bin\/run-as<\/pre>\n
    \"32-config\"<\/a>Unless you update the permission on the run-as tool, you won’t be able to debug native Android code, as the Android system won’t be able to launch the gdbserver under the correct user account.<\/li>\n
  35. Open a command prompt window on your Windows machine and run the “adb connect <IP ADDRESS>:5555” command followed by “adb shell”. You should see the Android shell of your virtual device:\"33-shell\"<\/a>You can close the shell by pressing Ctrl-D and exit the command prompt window.<\/li>\n
  36. Now we will show how to create and debug a basic OpenGL app with Visual Studio and VisualGDB. Start Visual Studio and launch the VisualGDB Android Project Wizard:\"34-androidprj\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  37. Select “Clone a sample from NDK”:\"35-clone\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  38. Select the san-angeles project from the sample list:\"36-sanangeles\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  39. Select the Android OS version that matches the version you installed into VirtualBox and select “x86” as the hardware platform:\"37-x86\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  40. Once the project is created, remove the app-linux.c<\/strong> and app-win32.c<\/strong> files:\"38-remove\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  41. Build the project with Ctrl-Shift-B:\"39-build\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  42. If your Android VM screen appears blank, the Android OS has most likely gone into the sleep mode and won’t react on keyboard and mouse events. Use the Machine->ACPI shutdown command to wake it up by emulating the power button press: \"40-wakeup\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  43. Hit F5 in Visual Studio to start debugging. You will see the san-angeles demo being rendered in the VirtualBox window:\"41-demo\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  44. Set a breakpoint somewhere in the code (e.g. in the camTrack() function). It should hit as soon as the function gets executed:\"42-break\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  45. You can now use the normal Visual Studio debugging techniques to debug your application. If you are using the Clang-based IntelliSense that comes with VisualGDB, you can also use advanced features like Preprocessor Lens and C++ Code Map:\"43-codemap\"<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    This tutorial shows how to use VirtualBox to accelerate debugging of Android apps with native components. We will show how<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[31,80,106],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":917,"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions\/917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualgdb.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}