Changelog

Report issues to GitHub.

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

Announcements

• GNU binutils, excluding the GNU Assembler (GAS), has been removed. GAS will be removed in the next release. If you are building with -fno-integrated-as, file bugs if anything is preventing you from removing that flag.

Changes

• Vulkan validation layer source and binaries are no longer shipped in the NDK. The latest are now posted directly to GitHub.
• Vulkan tools source is also removed, specifically vulkan_wrapper. It should be downloaded upstream from GitHub.
• The toolchain file (android.toolchain.cmake) is refactored to base on cmake's integrated Android support. This new toolchain file will be enabled by default for cmake 3.20 and newer. No user side change is expected. But if anything goes wrong, please file a bug and set ANDROID_USE_LEGACY_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=ON to restore the legacy behavior.

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 on devices running M or newer, or devices before M when using a static STL. The simple workaround is to not call dlclose.

• Issue 906: Clang does not pass -march=armv7-a to the assembler when using -fno-integrated-as. This results in the assembler generating ARMv5 instructions. Note that by default Clang uses the integrated assembler which does not have this problem. To workaround this issue, explicitly use -march=armv7-a when building for 32-bit ARM with the non-integrated assembler, or use the integrated assembler. ndk-build and CMake already contain these workarounds.

• 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 workaround will be necessary for this use case to work on all devices until at least Android R.

• Issue 1130: When using c++_static and the deprecated linker with ndk-build with an APP_PLATFORM below 21, undefined references to operator new may occur. The fix is to use LLD.

• This version of the NDK is incompatible with the Android Gradle plugin version 3.0 or older. If you see an error like No toolchains found in the NDK toolchains folder for ABI with prefix: mips64el-linux-android, update your project file to use plugin version 3.1 or newer. You will also need to upgrade to Android Studio 3.1 or newer.

• Issue 843: Using LLD with binutils strip or objcopy breaks RelRO. Use llvm-strip and llvm-objcopy instead. This issue has been resolved in Android Gradle Plugin version 4.0 (for non-Gradle users, the fix is also in ndk-build and our CMake toolchain file), but may affect other build systems.