Missing OpenGL drivers on Android emulator

Question

I am trying to set up an Android emulator to do some playing around with OpenGL ES on it, but I am stymied by the fact that, every time I run my program on it, it unceremoniously grenades itself. The problem (at least the first nasty red error line in the log) is a missing package called libhgl.so. This is the OpenGL driver file required for running OpenGL ES on Android devices, but for some reason, my emulator doesn't have it. Does anyone know where I can get drivers for the emulator, or how to get an emulator that already has them?

Answer 1

In this link:

http://osdir.com/ml/android-porting/2009-06/msg00282.html

it says:

libEGL.so and libGLESv2.so implements EGL and OpenGL ES through
libhgl.so and libagl.so. That is, libhgl.so and libagl.so are
dlopen()ed by libEGL.so. All EGL and OpenGL ES calls will finally call
into libhgl.so and/or libagl.so.

and here:

http://osdir.com/ml/android-porting/2009-06/msg00288.html

libagl.so is an pure software impl. For your accelerated impl., you
need to provide libhgl.so so that libEGL.so will be able to use it. It
is expected that libhgl.so implements and exports both eglXXX and glXXX
symbols.

I guess that indicates that the missing file will only exist on the device itself, but that the app should run with the software driver on the emulator. The numerous screenshots on the web of OpenGL apps on the Android emulator also indicates that OpenGL should work fine on the emulator. Any other possible reasons why you are not able to get OpenGL going?

Answer 2

The logic of loading EGL user space driver is at frameworks/native/opengl/libs/EGL/Loader.cpp. Basically there are three cases:

1. Running with emulator in software rendering mode
2. Running with emulator in OpenGL mode. This is where libhgl.so is loaded for earlier version of Android.
3. Running with actual device.

The emulator coming with ADT does not work well for case 2. But emulators are improved over recent years. You can use latest Android Studio which has a better emulator or leapdroid at http://www.leapdroid.com/