Having Android emulator in PATH breaks colima qemu wrapper logic

[SergeyPoznyakAkvelon]

Describe the Issue

When you have Android SDK installed using Android Studio or other methods and you manually add the ~/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/ to PATH, colima fails to start with an error:

> msg="[hostagent] could not find firmware for \"/Users/sergey/.colima/_wrapper/bin/qemu-system-x86_64\" (hint: try setting `firmware.legacyBIOS` to `true`)" fields.level=fatal
> msg="host agent process has exited: exit status 1"
FATA[0429] error starting vm: error at 'creating and starting': exit status 1

Version

Colima Version:

colima version 0.4.2
git commit: f112f336d05926d62eb6134ee3d00f206560493b

Lima Version:

0.11.0

Qemu Version

What is the output of qemu-img --version

qemu-img version 2.12.0(gradle_1.3.0-beta4-75998-g9abce6f84a)
Copyright (c) 2003-2017 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers

What is the output of /usr/local/bin/qemu-img --version

qemu-img version 7.0.0
Copyright (c) 2003-2022 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers

Operating System

• macOS Intel
• macOS m1
• Linux

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Install Android Studio
2. Install Android SDK from the Studio
3. Add ~/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/ to PATH
4. Try to install colima from homebrew and start it

Expected behavior

Expect colima to prefer the qemu version installed from homebrew.

Additional context

I stumbled on this when migrating from the nix package manager back to homebrew, because nix would take up too much space. After installing colima from homebrew I got this error and was stuck on it for a few hours. Couldn't find any similar issues, so creating this one.

I tracked down the issue when looking through the code referencing the _wrapper directory colima creates for qemu. When searching for the share directory it looks up qemu from path on this line:

colima/daemon/process/gvproxy/deps.go

Line 76 in 3c03f80

qemu, err := exec.LookPath("qemu-img")

I'd be happy to help with this, but I'm not sure what's the best solution here. Maybe detecting somehow that colima is installed from homebrew and looking up qemu only from /usr/local/bin or something like that?

Workaround

Delete android sdk emulator dir from PATH

[abiosoft]

Does the android sdk emulator directory include all qemu binaries? Does it also include qemu-system-aarch64 and qemu-system-x86_64 ?

[SergeyPoznyakAkvelon]

@abiosoft It includes:

bin64
darwin-aarch64-replace.sh
emulator
emulator-check
emulator64-crash-service
lib
lib64
mksdcard
package.xml
perfetto-protozero-protoc-plugin
qemu
qemu-img
qsn
resources
source.properties

[abiosoft]

because nix would take up too much space

If this is the only concern, there is nix-collect-garbage command (provided you are not aware).

[SergeyPoznyakAkvelon]

If this is the only concern, there is nix-collect-garbage command (provided you are not aware).

Yes, I know about it. But most of the packages that take up space are required for nix to run and a lot of them are copies of system utilities already available in macos. It would take 40gb of space for me and I kept running out of disk space on a daily basis.

[abiosoft]

@abiosoft It includes:

bin64
darwin-aarch64-replace.sh
emulator
emulator-check
emulator64-crash-service
lib
lib64
mksdcard
package.xml
perfetto-protozero-protoc-plugin
qemu
qemu-img
qsn
resources
source.properties

It becomes easier, we can easily check for qemu-system-{os_arch} instead.

[abiosoft]

A fix is underway, you can test with brew install --head colima once the build finishes and the PR gets merged.

[abiosoft]

Kindly confirm if this is fixed

[RobinCsl]

I ran into a similar issue, and running brew remove colima; brew install --head colima did the trick.
Thank you @abiosoft!