PSA: This software is useless with Intel + Virtualization enabled

[NinoDLC]

New Android developers (or returning ones reinstalling Android Studio a new computer like myself), if you get an error during Android Studio installation (something like 4294967201, I can't remember exactly), don't panic, this is fine by Google standards to ignore an error during installation.

You just need to enable Hyper-V on Windows and turn on Virtualization on your BIOS. Sometimes it's not called Virtualization so check out for other names for your specific machine / BIOS.

And that's all!

Android Studio, for some obscure reasons, will force you to install Android Emulator hypervisor driver, which will fail if you have Hyper-V enabled (because there's people using WSL or VM containers you know!). And the first tip you see when you look for that bloody useless "all englobing" error code 4294967201 is to disable Hyper-V (it's even in the wiki 🤦), making WSL or other stuff completely unusable, and not working at all in fact. For 2 days I was trying to make the emulator run. I tried so many different things.

But all I had to do was ignore this bloatware, actually enable Hyper-V, ignore the "Android Emulator hypervisor driver" installation failure and the emulator worked just fine without it.

I don't understand why you removed "AMD" from this bloatware name, this is so confusing and I spent 2 days because of that. Intel users are 100% fine without it.

/rant off

[breakgimme]

not everyone wants to have hyper-v enabled, the „amd” in the name came from back in the day the android emulator used haxm and that only worked on intel cpus
hyper-v is the bloatware tbh

[aviv-nino]

Hyper-V is the only solution to make the emulator work on Windows + Intel. I tried every combination possible with this software and absolutely nothing worked. At best, the emulator didn't work, at worst, the emulator didn't work and WSL neither.

So, sorry, but this is a bloatware for Intel.

[hgkamath]

• just a user here
• The hypervisor manager is a OS-component/driver that exposes the itself to VM software that runs on the OS.
• Hypervisor managers like AEHD, HyperV, hvf, kvm, vbox, vmware, hax etc drive and hence require a physical CPU resource capable of the hardware virtualization feature. The hypervisor manager's purpose is to manage that bit of CPU hardware to allow for software isolation needed by VMs. x86-64 CPUs must have Intel-VT-x or AMD-V SVM enabled in BIOS.
• A VM software needs to be aware (coded to make use) of the host-hypervisor manager technology that is exposed by the underlying host-OS.
• On a physical machine/CPU with hardware virtualization feature, at any given time, only a single hypervisor manager software can take control of the CPU resource that provides the hypervisor feature. So if more than one hypervisor manager software is available for a system, usually an admin would have configured the machine so that only one preferred hypervisor manager software is enabled/installed while the others are disabled/uninstalled. The setup could also be configured so that a first VM software acquires the CPU resource with its preferred hypervisor manager, while other VM software needing a different hypervisor manager but started later may fail to acquire due to contention.
• If one disables MS HyperV and installs/enables AEHD, it is to be expected that those VM-needing-software, most of which are included with Windows, that are aware of only HyperV and hence depend it, such as WSL, WSA, virtualized-security, Virtual-Box via HyperV etc, would not work. One may uninstall MS HyperV framework software from WinOS using the program features toggles in the control panel.
• AoTW, AFAIK, there are only 2 VM software are coded to be aware of AEHD and can hence make use of AEHD
  • 1.) the google official android emulator
  • 2.) an unofficial git repo fork of the qemu-project with AEHD host-backend patches, which was made to demo the proof of concept of the feature. The patches never made it through the review process of the official qemu.
• nb. there used to be an older discontinued Intel-developed rudimentary hypervisor manager called Intel-HAX. IIRC, hax allowed for running head-less VMs using a older version of qemu, qemu-7.0. qemu also later discontinued support for hax.

.

• but yes, if AEHD is buggy, unworkable and unusable even after the above considerations, then what you say stands. So before using AEHD, one must disable/uninstall HyperV, disable HyperV-Enabled-boot in BCDedit and prevent VM software that need HyperV from starting. I personally haven't tried it, though I would have if qemu AEHD matured and was upstreamed and maintained in official qemu.
• Given that google has so far officially supported it it as part of its documentation for the Android Emulator, my guess is it should work for their official advertised use case at least.

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• I wouldn't say the this software is useless, just yet. It is potentially useful for those users who can't use or don't want to use the hyperV ecosystem for whatever reasons. See issue #100 for more information.