The Android installer will then install the system to your hard disk.Select “Yes” as we will need to do some modifications to support debugging properly: The installer will ask you whether you want the system directory to be read-write.In order to boot Android from the hard disk, install the GRUB loader:.Format the partition with the ext3 file system:.Once you exit the cfdisk tool, the created partition will appear in the menu.Create one Linux partition for the entire disk and select “Save”:.A basic text-mode Linux environment will boot and the installation menu will appear.The ISO image you have specified will show a prompt asking whether you want to run Android or install it. Now you can start the virtual machine.Finally, remove the hard disk and add an IDE one instead of it:.Then mount the ISO image you downloaded to the virtual CD drive:.First, switch the network to the bridged mode so that the emulated device gets an IP address we can connect to: Before completing the wizard click “Customize hardware”:.Note that VMWare will create a SCSI disk by default and we will have to replace it with an IDE one: Proceed with the default parameters for the disk.Specify the VM name and the folder where you want to keep it:.Select “Linux” as the operating system:.Select “I will install the operating system later”:.Open VMWare and begin creating a new typical VM:.Using VMWare has an advantage of much faster simulation speed, however it will only simulate the x86 Android system, hence if you want to debug an ARM-specific problem, you will still need an actual device or the slow ARM emulator.īefore you begin, install VisualGDB and download an x86 Android image from, a project providing Android images compatible with moder PCs. We will first setup a virtual machine, then install Android there and finally use Visual Studio to debug the San-Angeles sample on it. Most of the techniques described here will also work with other virtualization software like VirtualBox. Head on back to the Android Virtual Device Manager and when creating or amending a virtual device you should now be able to select ‘Intel Atom (x86)’ as an option for whichever Target you installed the CPU image for.This tutorial shows how to accelerate the Android App development using virtual devices by replacing the slow Android emulator with faster VMWare. This is the equivalent of doing it through the Android SDK manager, once installed you'll be ready to test it out! Testing it out (If you need more help, instructions can be found on the intel website). Once downloaded, open up the installer and follow the instructions. If all has gone well then you're ready to test out your accelerated emulator! OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) users only!ĭownload the HAXM software with Mavericks hot fix. Skip down to the next section to see how to do it manually! Next install the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM) which allows faster Android emulation when on their chips Note: For OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) users there is a bug which means the automatic installation of HAXM does not work. Here's what to do: Open up the Android SDK manager and install the Intel x86 Atom System Image for whichever Android APIs you wish to test your app on. Using a host running OS X with an Intel chip. The next thing we can do is to our host CPU which has Virtual Machine acceleration features instead of the Virtual Machine's ARM CPU one which is slower. The delegating of graphics processing does help but only marginally. The solution is simple: when creating or amending a device simply check ‘use Host GPU’. You can speed things up by handing over this work to your host machines GPU - this not only improves the graphics but also frees up some much needed processing power for other parts of your app.

Know how to create a new device using the Android Virtual Device Manager Use your machine's GPUĬurrently the graphics are processed by the devices limited CPU. Here are a few tricks which can help speed things up: Prior knowledge

The problem is the built-in Android emulator is painfully slow and a lot of your time can be taken up just waiting for it to load up and respond to commands. The great thing about emulators are they allow you to test devices with different screen sizes and resolutions from your desktop without actually having to buy a physical device. When developing for Google Android it is important to test your apps properly on multiple devices.

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