How to start an AVD in Android Studio on Aspire 5 with an Intel GPU (I think)

published Dec 02, 2019 04:50 by admin ( last modified Dec 02, 2019 04:50 )

I could not get a Google Pixel 3A virtual device to start in Android Studio 3.5.2 on Ubuntu 19.04. The solution seems to be use a the "Swiftshader" GPU emulation. However I could not enable it. Eventually I edited the config file directly on disk, and made sure to enable cold boot. Without cold boot it crashed, due to Swiftshader not supporting checkpoints afaict.

I found the device file as

$HOME/.android/avd/Pixel_3a_API_29.avd/config.ini

And I changed to:

hw.gpu.mode=swiftshader

However after starting up the editor, it seems to have changed it to:

hw.gpu.enabled=no
hw.gpu.mode=off

But at least it starts up the AVD now!