The Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (Intel® HAXM) is a hardware-assisted virtualization engine (hypervisor) that uses Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) to speed up Android app emulation on a host machine. In combination with Android x86 emulator images provided by Intel and the official Android SDK Manager, HAXM allows for faster Android emulation on Intel VT enabled systems. HAXM for both Windows and IOS are available now.
Since Google only support Android build on Linux platform ( mainly Ubuntu 64-bit OS), and a lot of Android Developers are using AVD on Eclipse hosted by a Linux system. It is very critical that Android developers take advantage of Intel hardware-assisted KVM virtualization for Linux just like HAXM for Windows and IOS.
Below are the quick step-by-step on how to install KVM on Ubuntu platform and start Android AVD with Intel hardware-assisted virtualization (hypervisor) on Linux. The result is very pleasing and AVD runs significantly faster and smoother than without hypervisor ( see video attached below).
KVM Installation
I referred the instructions from Ubuntu community documentation page. to get KVM installed.To see if your processor supports hardware virtualization, you can review the output from this command:
$ egrep -c ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo
I got 64. If 0 it means that your CPU doesn’t support hardware virtualization.
$kvm-ok
If you see
“INFO: Your CPU supports KVM extensions
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used”
It means you can run your virtual machine faster with the KVM extensions.
If you see
“INFO: KVM is disabled by your BIOS
HINT: Enter your BIOS setup and enable Virtualization Technology (VT),
and then hard poweroff/poweron your system
KVM acceleration can NOT be used”
You need to go to BIOS setup and enable the VT.
Use a 64 bit kernel
Running a 64 bit kernel on the host operating system is recommended but not required.
To serve more than 2GB of RAM for your VMs, you must use a 64-bit kernel (see 32bit_and_64bit). On a 32-bit kernel install, you’ll be limited to 2GB RAM at maximum for a given VM.
Also, a 64-bit system can host both 32-bit and 64-bit guests. A 32-bit system can only host 32-bit guests.
To see if your processor is 64-bit, you can run this command:
$ egrep -c ‘ lm ‘ /proc/cpuinfo
If 0 is printed, it means that your CPU is not 64-bit.
If 1 or higher, it is. Note: lm stands for Long Mode which equates to a 64-bit CPU.
Now see if your running kernel is 64-bit, just issue the following command:
$ uname -m
x86_64 indicates a running 64-bit kernel. If you use see i386, i486, i586 or i686, you’re running a 32-bit kernel.
Install KVM
Lucid (10.04) or later
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder bridge-utils
You may ignore the Postfix Configuration below by selecting “No Configuration”
Next is to add your <username> to the group kvm and libvirtd
$ sudo adduser your_user_name kvm
$ sudo adduser your_user_name libvirtd
After the installation, you need to relogin so that your user becomes an effective member of kvm and libvirtd user groups. The members of this group can run virtual machines.
Verify Installation
You can test if your install has been successful with the following command:
$ sudo virsh -c qemu:///system list
Your screen will pain the following below if successful:
Id Name State
———————————-
Start the AVD from Android SDK Directly from Terminal (Not by+ AVD Manager in Eclipse)
Now start the Android for x86 Intel Emulator using the following command:
$ <SDK directory>/tools/emulator-x86 -avd Your_AVD_Name -qemu -m 2047 -enable-kvm
Only a 64-bits Ubuntu can allow you to run allocated Memory of 2G or more. My 64-bit Ubuntu has 6G of Memory, so I used 1/3 of it for Android AVD. My AVD name is Intel_Atom_gingerbread_2.3 . ‘-qemu’ provides the options to qemu, and ‘-m’ specifies the amount of memory for the emulated Android (i.e. guest). If you use too small value for that, it’s possible that performance is bad because of frequent swapping activities. Add ‘-show-kernel’ to see the message from the kernel.
The YouTube in Android x86 Intel Atom Gingerbread AVD is running fast and responsively in two level of virtual mode ( I remote login to a Ubuntu 10.04 and run the AVD from there).
Here is a YouTube video on the user experience of how a Intel Android x86 Gingerbread emulator in Android AVD is performing with Intel hardware-assisted KVM virtualization in Linux platform:
