emulator: WARNING: Could not initialize OpenglES emulation, using software renderer

Question

What do these error messages mean from the Android emulator?

Starting emulator for AVD \'AVD\'
Failed to create Context 0x3005
could not get wglGetExtensions         


        

Answer 1

I think Gerd's solution was the most helpful.

In case somebody stumbles across this, a more detailed and complete solution...

The vanilla studio.sh starter-shell script sets an env-variable:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$IDE_BIN_HOME:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

that it then exports. The IDE_BIN_HOME is set by using the location of the studio.sh file (somewhere in the middle - usually [android-studio]/bin). When an emulator is launched through Studio->Manger->Tools->Manage AVDs this env-var is prefixed with android-SDK/tools/bin. Meaning when you start it standalone, you didn't set that env-var. Gerd's solution adds the lib to the system lib-search-path. Another approach would be to create a wrapper that takes care of this so that it's only set when needed and (possibly) other things are also set.

#!/bin/bash
export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-BLAH"
export STUDIO_JDK="$JAVA_HOME"     #This is also used in studio.sh
export IDE_BIN_HOME="/home/you/android-studio/bin"
export Anroid_SDK="/home/you/android-sdk"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$Anroid_SDK/tools/lib:$IDE_BIN_HOME:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

cd "$Anroid_SDK/tools"

./emulator64-x86 -avd AVD-NAME-1 -gpu on &
./emulator64-arm -avd AVD-NAME-2

This is probably a bit overdone, but it's complete ;) Depending on Distro/Setup JAVA_HOME may be preset, so you could drop that line. If you constantly use the emulator, you could also add something like

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="[YOUR Studio PATH]/tools/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

to your .bashrc or .profile file.

But to answer the actual question: It means that the emulator wasn't able to run (hardware-accel?) OpenGLES, and that it's using software routines to implement/emulate OpenGLES :D To enable emulator to find the desired lib, make sure you have proper (3D-Accel.?) graphic-card drivers installed, then choose one of the above (wrapper shell or (bash-)session-init settings).

Note that newer versions of Android-Studio have forked out the SDK

Answer 2

You have to play around with your android device specification like RAM, Heap other specification.

It's hard to tell you which must be set to what. In my case I set RAM as 512 and Heap 128 to make it work.