Take an Android Chrome tracing from laptops with small storage

./tools/profile_chrome.py is our friend to take a great tracing data from Android Chrome and Chromium. But usually it requires to check out the huge chromium repository that is too large, about 8-GB, to have it in some sorts of laptop devices. This is a note to copy small set of files from an existing checkout to run the tool on another laptop device.

desktop % tar zcvf chromium_tools.tgz \
> ./build \
> ./third_party/android_testrunner \
> ./third_party/catapult \
> ./tools

laptop % scp desktop:chromium_tools.tgz /dev/stdout | tar zxv

The expanded files still need 512-MB of your storage, but would be much better than 8-GB.

Memo to build official android emulator

This is a memo to build official android emulator which Android SDK includes. This emulator forked from qemu.

Get source codes

$ cd $WORK
$ git clone git://codeaurora.org/platform/external/qemu.git

Build

$ cd $WORK/qemu
$ git checkout origin/aosp/tools_r13
$ ./android-configure.sh
$ make

Prepare OS images

$ cd $WORK
$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r13-linux_x86.tgz
$ tar zxf android-sdk_r13-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86/
$ ./tools/android
(Install SDK platform packages, then create virtual machine definition named X in GUI. Android 1.6, 2.3.3, and 3.2 will work fine.)

Launch the OS image

$ ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=$WORK/android-sdk-linux_x86 $WORK/qemu/objs/emulator-arm @X
(X is the name you named in preparing OS images.)

Memos

• codeaurora.org is an unofficial mirror repository. If kernel.org come back, you must use the git://android.kernel.org repository.
• If you'd like to build on OS X, you must build in a case-sensitive file system because block.h conflicts with system provided Block.h. Default file system is case-*in*sensitive, so you may prepare a disk image and work in it as follows;
• $ hdiutil create $NAME -size 1024m -fs HFSX -volume $VOLUME; hdiutil attach $NAME; cd /Volumes/$VOLUME; do something...
• If you'd like to build trunk sources, you may want to use prebuilt SDL library in /platform/prebuilt.git. It could be passed via --sdl-config arguments in android-configure.sh. But I guess it miss three functions including SDL_WM_GetPos, etc. Also it will be a pretty tough and boring work to find some stable combinations between versions of SDL, qemu, and OS images.