Android Emulator Acceleration

on general

Resource Site

Commands Actually Run

# determine 32 vs. 64 bit OS
>file /sbin/init

# ensure all repos are up-to-date
>sudo apt-get update

# should be greater than 0 to support hardware virtualization (BIOS must enable virtualization!)
>egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

# installs kvm-ok program used to check whether CPU supports kvm virt
>sudo apt-get install cpu-checker

>kvm-ok
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

>sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder bridge-utils

# my user was already a member of libvirtd so I just needed to add to kvm group
>sudo adduser your_user_name kvm

# test installation after logging out/in
sudo virsh -c qemu:///system list

Installing x86 Intel Atom

Only Intel Atom-based emulated phones benefit from the accelerator. But when setting up a new emulator, Intel Atom wasn’t one of my CPU/ABI choices. So I needed to install that via the Android SDK manager (the half Android/half download arrow icon next to the Android Virtual Device Manager icon).

  • For whatever version, select Intel x86 Atom System Image and install