Running Android emulator inside a Virtualbox Vm

Question

I'm trying to setup a VM with a complete android development stack (SDK, Platforms, Eclipse etc) for a Hackathon. I'm having real trouble getting the emulator to start in the VM. I realize that the emulator is essentially a VM itself inside the Vbox VM and so is going to be slow, but it just hangs at the Android splash screen and never gets any further.

Might there be something going on with the VM that is causing it to run so very slowly? Is there anything I can do to give the VM more CPU? I've tried setting the execution cap to 100% but it didn't help any.

Anyone know what might be going on here, or have any ideas about how I might speed it up?

Thanks

Steve.

Answer 1

You can figure out what's taking so long with these commands:

adb kill-server
adb shell logcat

The emulator does take a long time to start up on -- two minutes on high-end hardware. Essentially, it's doing a full device coldstart.

Also, the emulator sometimes fails the first time you try to start a device. Just close the device and launch it again. It should work from then on.