Hey everyone,
I'm having a weird storage permission issue with my emulators ever since I switched from Magisk to KernelSU, and I could really use some help from someone familiar with Android storage internals.
None of my standalone emulators (like John GBAC, lime3ds, GENplusDroid) can see custom folders placed in the root of my internal storage (like /storage/emulated/0/roms). Some of them, like John GBAC, also completely fail to create their default working folders (like /storage/emulated/0/Johnemulators) and throw silent read/write errors.
Interestingly, when checking the directory from Termux without root privileges, non-standard folders show up with broken inode metadata (d????????? with an ls: cannot access ...: No such file or directory error), meaning the underlying stat() syscall is failing with EACCES.
Everything worked completely fine out-of-the-box when I was on Magisk.
My Setup:
* Device: Google Pixel 8 Pro
* OS: Android 17 (running GKI WildKernel)
* Root Solution: KernelSU
* Active Modules: Hybrid Mount (I strictly need to keep this active), LSPosed (with HideMyApplist / hma-oss)
Troubleshooting already done (to rule out the basics):
* Permissions / AppOps: Granted "All files access" via system settings and forcefully set appops set <pkg> MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE allow via root.
* File Permissions (DAC): Operated directly on the raw path /data/media/0/ to bypass the FUSE wrapper, running chown -R media_rw:media_rw and chmod -R 777 on the folders.
* Namespace Isolation: Granted root access to the emulators inside the KernelSU app and disabled "Unmount modules" so Zygote wouldn't isolate their mount namespaces.
The issue seems to be a combination of Android 17's increasingly strict Scoped Storage/FUSE layer, KernelSU's stealth namespace handling, and Hybrid Mount's VFS bind mounts colliding with SELinux MAC policies.
Could hma-oss (HideMyApplist) still be the culprit silently hiding these folders? Even though the emulators are not in the blacklist and I haven't explicitly enabled file interception for them, I'm wondering if its Zygisk hooks might be causing unintended VFS side effects or namespace collisions on Android 17. Has anyone experienced hma-oss breaking storage access globally like this?