When building Lollipop, I could compile my changes by running:
make clean-framework clean-services clean-services.core services.core services framework && make snod
However, this is not reliable for Marshmallow. Sometimes it works, and other times my changes will not be compiled. I have also seen this produce an unbootable build, forcing me to do a full make -j8, which takes almost an hour on my machine.
Am I missing a new build target? Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
The reason my partial builds failed to boot was due to dex pre-optimization. When dexpreopt is enabled, you cannot recompile certain parts of the system image, since they are byte-aligned and optimized together at compile time. After disabling dexpreopt, and doing a make clobber && make -j6, I was able to do partial builds with no issues.
To disable dexpreopt, set the following variables in your terminal:
export WITH_DEXPREOPT=false
export DISABLE_DEXPREOPT=true
TIP: add the above to your build/envsetup.sh or your .bashrc so you don't have to remember each time.
TIP 2: There is also a DONT_DEXPREOPT_PREBUILTS, but I have never had a problem with that, so I leave it set to the default, which isfalse. If you set this variable to true, it will take an incredibly long time (easily over an hour) for the device to boot after your flash it, since it has to optimize everything first.