How can I do command line debugging using Android NDK

Issue

I am trying to debug a C++ Android application using Android NDK r20.

The project used to use the old way of building using ndk-build and the android.mk file.

Now the project is migrated to using gradle and cmake. Because of this, the ndk-gdb script no longer works, since it uses the old build system which expects an android.mk file.

So how am I supposed to debug from the command line using the latest ndk along with a gradle/cmake build system? Is there a new script that is provided?

Solution

ndk-gdb doesn't know how to do it out of the box right now. You can set up some symlinks in a gradle project to make the directory layout match a standalone ndk-build project which will let ndk-gdb work. See https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/refs/heads/master/samples/NdkGdbSample/ for an example.

ndk-gdb doesn't work at all with CMake though.

See https://github.com/android-ndk/ndk/issues/1024 (I assume that's actually you that filed it). I don't know when we'll be able to do it, but what's described there is essentially what we'll do. We'll keep the existing script, get it to work with gradle projects, and (eventually) switch it to lldb under the covers.

Using Android Studio is your best bet for native debugging on Android right now.

Answered By - Dan Albert