Installing a x86 image in new sdk tools v12

In the GUI of the SDK for emulator configuration, the CPU type drop down box is disabled. Probably this is something they are preparing for the release 13 of the Android SDK tools. (it is also possible that non of my installed platform revision have x86 images)

I tried to run one of my emulator images as x86 explicitly, and get this:

C:\Program Files\Android-SDK\tools>emulator-x86.exe -avd HTC_Magicqemu: linux kernel too old to load a ram disk C:\Program Files\Android-SDK/platforms\android-4\images\/kernel-qemu, C:\Program Files\Android-SDK/add-ons\addon_google_apis_google_inc_4\images\/ramdisk.img, qemu=1 console=ttyS0 android.qemud=ttyS1 androidboot.hardware=goldfish clocksource=pit android.checkjni=1 ndns=2

I think the emulator image needs to be created explicitly for x86... Would be nice to have an x86 image so the performance of underlining qemu goes up, as it will not need to emulate ARM CPU instruction set...

You can already run http://www.android-x86.org/ and connect to it with adb over tcpip right now. You do not need the SDK support for it. And it is very fast.

Otherwise if you install the Google TV add on on linux you can create a Google TV avd and that will use x86. It really works nicely only on Linux though since that is where it is tunneled to the hypervisor properly.

There are various blog post around on how to set that up properly e.g. http://commonsware.com/blog/2011/09/01/google-tv-emulator-seemingly-pointless.html

You should install Intel® Atom™ Android x86 Emulator Image.

You could find detailed instructions at this link