Changelog r25

Changelog

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For Android Studio issues, follow the docs on the Android Studio site.

If you're a build system maintainer that needs to use the tools in the NDK directly, see the build system maintainers guide.

Announcements

• Support for KitKat (APIs 19 and 20) is planned to be removed in the next NDK release. The minimum OS supported by the NDK for r26 will be Lollipop (API level 21). See Issue 1751 for details.

r25c

• Updated LLVM to clang-r450784d1, based on LLVM 14 development.
  • Issue 1797: Fixed LLDB handling of forward slashes in absolute paths on Windows.
  • Issue 1832: Improvements to aarch64 vector code generation.
• Issue 1813: -Wl,--gc-sections is no longer set by default for debug builds. This behavior was removed because it could cause the linker to remove functions that may be useful to evaluate during debugging. The new CMake toolchain file (-DANDROID_USE_LEGACY_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=OFF, not the default behavior) does not include this fix because it requires a CMake fix first.
• Issue 1757: Updated simpleperf. Includes fix for signing denial when run on macOS.

r25b

• Issue 1739: Fixed C compatibility issue in amidi/AMidi.h.
• Issue 1740: Fixed the legacy toolchain when using CMake's Release build configuration. Since r23b it has not be receiving any optimization flag. It will now receive -O3. If you're building with AGP and haven't overridden AGP's default CMake modes, this change does not affect you, as AGP uses RelWithDebInfo by default.
• Issue 1744: Fixes ASan wrap.sh file to support 32-bit apps on 64-bit devices.

Changes

• Includes Android 13 APIs.
• Updated LLVM to clang-r450784d, based on LLVM 14 development.
  • Issue 1455: Improved display of Android API levels in Clang diagnostics.
  • Issue 1608: Fixed crash in vector conversions.
  • Issue 1710: Fixed compiler crash caused by invalid -march values.
• Eliminate duplicate static libraries in API-versioned sysroot directories. This reduces the uncompressed size of the NDK by 500 MB.
• Strip some binaries and libraries. This reduces the uncompressed size of the NDK by 300 MB.
• Remove python2. All scripts now use python3.
• Issue 933: Updated reference ASan wrap.sh to support attaching the Java debugger.
• Issue 1334: Improved argument escaping for compile_commands.json files generated by ndk-build.
• Issue 1634: Fixed the build rule for the libshaderc_combined target.
• Issue 1693: The NDK's toolchain file for CMake (android.toolchain.cmake) defaults to the legacy toolchain file for all versions of CMake. The new toolchain file can still be enabled using -DANDROID_USE_LEGACY_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=OFF.
• Issue 1717: Arranged for --gc-sections to be passed to the linker when building shared libraries.

Known Issues

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all outstanding bugs.

• Issue 360: thread_local variables with non-trivial destructors will cause segfaults if the containing library is dlcloseed. This was fixed in API 28, but code running on devices older than API 28 will need a workaround. The simplest fix is to stop calling dlclose. If you absolutely must continue calling dlclose, see the following table:

  	Pre-API 23	APIs 23-27	API 28+
  No workarounds	Works for static STL	Broken	Works
  -Wl,-z,nodelete	Works for static STL	Works	Works
  No dlclose	Works	Works	Works

  If your code must run on devices older than M (API 23) and you cannot use the static STL (common), the only fix is to not call dlclose, or to stop using thread_local variables with non-trivial destructors.

  If your code does not need to run on devices older than API 23 you can link with -Wl,-z,nodelete, which instructs the linker to ignore dlclose for that library. You can backport this behavior by not calling dlclose.

  The fix in API 28 is the standardized inhibition of dlclose, so you can backport the fix to older versions by not calling dlclose.

• Issue 988: Exception handling when using ASan via wrap.sh can crash. To workaround this issue when using libc++_shared, ensure that your application's libc++_shared.so is in LD_PRELOAD in your wrap.sh as in the following example:

  #!/system/bin/sh
  HERE="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd)"
  export ASAN_OPTIONS=log_to_syslog=false,allow_user_segv_handler=1
  ASAN_LIB=$(ls $HERE/libclang_rt.asan-*-android.so)
  if [ -f "$HERE/libc++_shared.so" ]; then
      # Workaround for https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/988.
      export LD_PRELOAD="$ASAN_LIB $HERE/libc++_shared.so"
  else
      export LD_PRELOAD="$ASAN_LIB"
  fi
  "$@"

  There is no known workaround for libc++_static.

  Note that because this is a platform bug rather than an NDK bug this cannot be fixed with an NDK update. This workaround will be necessary for code running on devices that do not contain the fix, and the bug has not been fixed even in the latest release of Android.