Android Emulator Yosemite
By default Android emulator is extremely slow. It takes 5 minutes to start the emulator!
I have created several Android emulators in Eclipse on a new Macbook Air running Yosemite. All Android SDKs have been installed and all Eclipse updates are installed as well. When I start any of the emulators, they start to load but always restart at some point and never fully launch - Always hanging on the Android logo screen. Pro Tip: Android Emulator tool should have good integration with Android devices. It should be fast and should give a smooth gaming experience for high definition games. It should have a customization option for configurations and support external devices like keyboard, IPad, mouse or joystick for the improved user gaming experience. HAXM not working on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite JetCracker. By default Android emulator is extremely slow. It takes 5 minutes to start the emulator! To make it faster there are two approaches: If your machine supports Intel VT-x technology, you can install special HAXM extension, so that the emulator will make use of all the power your computer has.
To make it faster there are two approaches:
- If your machine supports Intel VT-x technology, you can install special HAXM extension, so that the emulator will make use of all the power your computer has.
- If your computer doesn’t support virtualisation, you can still significantly improve the boot time of the emulator by configuring it to save its state. This will make the emulator start faster, but the UI will still be slow, and it will take a bit longer for the emulator to close.
There is a pretty detailed Stackoverflow answer regarding HAXM and Android emulator performance.
Unfortunately, my old laptop didn’t support Intel virtualisation technology, so I didn’t even consider working with emulator. Instead, I always used a physical android device to test my apps.
When I started the emulator on Mac, I hoped it would run much faster (with SSD and Intel Core i7 on board). But no – the emulator was still very slow. This brought me to Stackoverflow, where they discussed how to enhance the speed of Android emulator by installing HAXM.
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So, I tried to make the emulator on freshly installed Mac OS X 10.0 Yosemite run faster. I followed the instructions provided in the article, but at the end of installation, I got error message, saying that my laptop supports virtualisation, but VT-x is disabled.
According to Apple official specs, all latest macs that are running on Intel CPUs, have VT-x feature enabled by default. It might seen as disabled by the HAXM Installation Manager for two reasons:
Android Emulator Yosemite Download
- VT-x future is currently in use by another application (such as Parallels Desktop or other virtual machine).
- Something is wrong with the left falange (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrwVB4vMx-Q).
As I didn’t have any other emulators or virtual machines running, I decided to find a way to make it work. And after some googling, I finally found a solution. According to the blog post I found, there was an issue with an incorrectly signed kernel extension on Intel’s part. I believe Intel will fix it soon, but for now as a workaround, we can use the following command:
This makes kexts to run in dev mode and disables all signing checks. Changes will take affect after system restart.