Intel Releases HAXM 7.8 As One Last Hurrah For The Open-Source Project

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Releases HAXM 7.8 As One Last Hurrah For The Open-Source Project

Earlier this month Intel announced they would be discontinuing development of HAXM as a hardware-accelerated execution manager that's been popular on Windows and macOS for Android emulation. While the original announcement discontinued its development immediately, they decided to go ahead and put out one final version: Intel HAXM 7.8 is available today for concluding this open-source project...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-HAXM-7.8-Released

[milkylainen]

Cancelled @ Intel. Along with a whole lot of everything else.
Profit margins. Counting the beans. Etc.

Ugh.. Sorry for the shitty attitude. It's just sad.

[ll1025]

Cancelled @ Intel. Along with a whole lot of everything else.
Profit margins. Counting the beans. Etc.

Ugh.. Sorry for the shitty attitude. It's just sad.

I've never heard of the project and from the limited info in the article I'm left agreeing with them: What exactly did they provide that HyperV, HVF, KVM, Xen, VMWare, Virtualbox, Parallels..... dont already provide?

They didn't even have a Linux release from what I can see.

Reallocating those resources seems like a good business move. It isn't as if Intel doesn't have other roles that need devs.

[milkylainen]

I've never heard of the project and from the limited info in the article I'm left agreeing with them.

It was a comment on the Intel downsizing in general.
This is one of a bunch of them.
Including proposed fabs that won't materialize etc.

They're realizing the proposed cuts from Q4, into Q1 2023.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/27/23427403/intel-q3-2022-layoffs-billions-cost-reductions

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/18/intel_israeli_research/

etc.

[SteamPunker]

The decision totally makes sense, though, and it's understandable.

With the recent cessation of support for Windows 7, all Windows and macOS versions that came without an integrated hypervisor have been EOL'ed at this point, so there is simply no more need for HAXM. HAXM also works on Linux, but the mainline Linux kernel has had KVM for a long time.

And on those older discontinued OS versions still lacking a built-in hypervisor, the already released versions of HAXM will continue to work. Yeah, it won't receive any bugfixes or security patches going forward, but neither will those older operating systems.

[ll1025]

And on those older discontinued OS versions still lacking a built-in hypervisor,...

Windows 7 also had a built in hypervisor (XP mode / Virtual PC). It wasn't used much, but it's there. And if you really need something more mainstream, Virtualbox has been around forever.

IOW, even without Win7 being EOL'd I just don't see the value add.

[RecursiveRose]

HAXM was useful for Android emulation accel (dev and normal use), Android subsystem for windows is a much more a gardened wall experience.

Pushing people towards HyperV will mean Microsoft making $$ on devs being forced into pro windows licences sometime down the road or moving over to Linux.

It's a loss for the windows ecosystem, but little besides.

[kpedersen]

HAXM was quite nice in that on Windows it allowed you to use lighter tools like Qemu and create an environment similar to production (just substituting -accel=kvm with hax). I.e here.

However I believe that you can now do that with Hyper-V via -accel=whpx and via hvf on macOS for their Hypervisor Framework. I am assuming this should be suitable for Android emulation?

[binarybanana]

HAXM was quite nice in that on Windows it allowed you to use lighter tools like Qemu and create an environment similar to production (just substituting -accel=kvm with hax). I.e here.

However I believe that you can now do that with Hyper-V via -accel=whpx and via hvf on macOS for their Hypervisor Framework. I am assuming this should be suitable for Android emulation?

I dunno about Android emulation but qemu on Windows works great with whpx. IO to disk/network is slower than VMware, but much faster than VirtualBox.

[kpedersen]

I dunno about Android emulation but qemu on Windows works great with whpx. IO to disk/network is slower than VMware, but much faster than VirtualBox.

Nice. That is really good to know. I personally prefer to configure my VMs through simple command line arguments rather than chunky opaque UIs. Plus the Hyper-V VM viewer is extremely poorly implemented (preset zoom %, no scaling, no stretch. Bizarre!).