Suppress launching emulator using Android within VirtualBox

Question

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 ?

Answer 1

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.