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androidandroid-emulatoradbvirtualboxandroid-x86

Suppress launching emulator using Android within VirtualBox

Description

I am running Android-x86 7.1 using VirtualBox. I want to adb connect from the host to the guest. I experience a very random behavior when it comes to adb devices. As soon as the virtual machine runs there is a chance that an emulator called emulator-5554 appears. Sometimes it is listed, sometimes it is not. Connecting to the device using adb connect 127.0.0.1 results in the following:

  • If emulator-5554 is listed the device 127.0.0.1:5555 is marked offline and it cannot be used. emulator-5554 must be used then.
  • If emulator-5554 is not listed I can use the device 127.0.0.1:5555 without any problem.

adb devices -l shows that the emulator is coming from the virtual machine: device product:android_x86_64 model:VirtualBox device:x86_64 transport_id:1

Problem

Even though emulator-5554 works fine and I can communicate with the virtual machine I cannot rely on this due to I want to automate things. 127.0.0.1 is given by my VirtualBox network configuration. The name emulator-5554 seems random and might change. Therefore I need to use adb connect 127.0.0.1 which is not possible when the emulator is online.

VirtualBox configuration

Network settings

  • Only adapter 1 is active, adapter 2-4 are not enabled
  • Attatched to: NAT
  • Port forwarding:
    • Name: ADB#1, Protocol: TCP, Host IP: 127.0.0.1, Host Port: 5555, Guest IP: 10.0.2.15, Guest Port: 5555
    • Name: ADB#2, Protocol: TCP, Host IP: 127.0.0.1, Host Port: 5554, Guest IP: 10.0.2.15, Guest Port: 5554

USB settings

  • Enable USB Controller not checked

Current approach

The current approach is represented by all of the current settings that I have made which still lead to a randomly appearing emulator-5554.

Using adb kill-server & adb -s emulator-5554 emu kill didn't have any effect aswell.

Question

Is there anything I can do to stop emulator-5554 from starting up and therefore showing up in my adb devices?

Solution

  • I could solve the problem by using the following port forwarding rules.

    • Only adapter 1 is active, adapter 2-4 are not enabled
    • Attatched to: NAT
    • Port forwarding:
      • Name: ADB#1, Protocol: TCP, Host IP: leave blank, Host Port: 55551, Guest IP: leave blank, Guest Port: 5555
      • Name: ADB#2, Protocol: TCP, Host IP: leave blank, Host Port: 55541, Guest IP: leave blank, Guest Port: 5554

    So the difference to my first approach is leaving blank both host and guest IP as well as choosing different ports for host and guest ports.