Make the default android emulator faster

Question

The default android emulator is ridiculously slow and resource hungry, which makes it an impractical solution.

How can I speed up the default emulator?

Answer 1

Android development was initially done on a desktop simulator. It has never been an official part of the release, and the code is usually published to the AOSP site in a somewhat broken state, but it's there. The feature that kept it alive was valgrind, since (until recently) that wasn't usable on ARM.

If you look at these docs and scroll down to "Working with the desktop build", you can see some instructions for using the sim-eng build to run a simple Dalvik program.

Running "simulator" launches the wxWidgets-based front-end. From there you can start the system. Source code for that, and a bit of fanciness that does run-time interception of various system calls, can be found in the source tree.

Update: the simulator was removed entirely from the sources for the Ice Cream Sandwich release, so you need to look through the 2.3 (Gingerbread) sources to see it.