Runner action hangs after killing emulator with stop: not implemented

[ericswpark]

When running my GitHub Actions workflow, the emulator runner action hangs after the emulator is killed, with the following log output:

Terminate Emulator
  /usr/local/lib/android/sdk/platform-tools/adb -s emulator-5554 emu kill
  OK: killing emulator, bye bye
  OK
  INFO    | Wait for emulator (pid 4126) 20 seconds to shutdown gracefully before kill;you can set environment variable ANDROID_EMULATOR_WAIT_TIME_BEFORE_KILL(in seconds) to change the default value (20 seconds)
INFO    | Discarding the changed state: command-line flag
WARNING | Discarding the changed state (command-line flag).
ERROR   | stop: Not implemented

[grodin]

This seems to be related to #381. I debugged my workflow run with tmate which similarly had two crashpad_handler processes running and the same logs as in the issue.

Terminating the two crashpad_handler processes with SIGTERM allowed the android-emulator-runner step to complete.

[ericswpark]

Seems like there should be a step at the end that kill -9s all the crashpad_handler processes.

Either that or disable crashpad_handler from running in the first place (I'm guessing it's some sort of error reporting mechanism from Google to report errors with the Android emulator?)

[grodin]

So far I've managed to find out that crashpad-handler is the daemon part of crashpad, a crash reporter.

I've done some digging in the emulator source repo. It seems the emulator uses crashpad to report crashes back to Google, so we're not going to be able to prevent the crashpad-handler processes getting started.

Killing them after the emulator has shutdown seems like a reasonable workaround, but we should do that with SIGTERM first! Going straight to kill -KILL is a bit, er, overkill. I can't immediately think of any harm, given that the VM the action is running in will be thrown away soon, but it's generally not recommended to use SIGKILL until necessary.

I'm fairly certain that this will need to be done as part of the action though.

I suspect, but haven't confirmed, that the root cause of this is that when the emulator is told to shutdown, some node.js code sends a signal to the emulator, but then waits for the whole process tree to end, not just the emulator process. However, if the emulator doesn't pass on signals to it's child processes, they won't receive any signal telling them to quit, so the waiting will go on forever.

If I'm correct (will try to find out this week), trying to kill the extra processes outside of the action won't work, since that code will be waiting for the action to finish to have a chance to run. It's a classic deadlock effectively.

[benszedlmayer]

Are there any updates here? My log output is exactly same as in the original issue, it completes all processes then just hangs forever. Trying to kill the crashpad process with kill -9 $(pgrep -f crashpad_handler) fails.

[troZee]

I have a similar issue here: https://github.com/callstack/react-native-pager-view/actions/runs/9576519647/job/26403174451?pr=829 . Does anyone know how to fix it?

[limpbrains]

I have the same issue. Emulator just hangs forever
https://github.com/synonymdev/react-native-ldk/actions/runs/9724215820/job/26840196419?pr=251

[mustalk]

For anyone facing this issue, I've discovered that setting the environment variable ANDROID_EMULATOR_WAIT_TIME_BEFORE_KILL: 60 helps sometimes, but it's inconsistent.

In my case, the issue seemed to be affected by the emulator saved snapshot, so not saving the AVD snapshot should help as well.

If none of the previous solutions work, as @grodin mentioned regarding the crashpad_handler, you can use the following steps to terminate the processes:

- name: Kill crashpad_handler processes
  if: always()
  run: |
    pkill -SIGTERM crashpad_handler || true
    sleep 5
    pkill -SIGKILL crashpad_handler || true

This should definitely stop the hang issue.

[ericswpark]

@mustalk are you sure that step will work? My understanding is that the previous step will hang and stop execution of that step that will kill crashpad_handler.

[mustalk]

@ericswpark that's what i thought at first too, but to my surprise it did execute, even without the if: always(), at least in my setup, give it a try.

[fernando-jascovich]

I was having this issue while running manually android emulator (I'm not using android-emulator-runner). And looking for answers I came here.
After that I discovered the solution. You'll need to kill android emulator's qemu process with SIGSTOP. For example:

# Being XXXXXX pid for android sdk qemu-system process
kill STOP XXXXXXX

That will handle snapshot generation and crashpad_handler as expected and emulator will end successfully