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.

HAXM had been in development for years as a hardware-assisted virtualization engine making use of Intel VT. It was especially popular for accelerating the Android Emulator on Windows. At the start of the year though they decided to discontinue the project. Originally they also attributed it to having known security issues, only to later backtrack and note that apparently that portion of the discontinuation message was posted by mistake. They updated it to say that Microsoft Hyper-V and macOS HVF have since become a popular conduit for Intel VT usage on those platforms, thus time to retire HAXM.

Waking up this morning it was a surprise to see HAXM 7.8 released just weeks after the project was discontinued. Yesterday they updated the project status message to:

"HAXM was created to bring Intel Virtualization Technology to Windows and macOS users. Today both Microsoft Hyper-V and macOS HVF have added support for Intel Virtual Machine Extensions. We have therefore decided to retire the HAXM project. HAXM v7.8.0 is our last release and we will not accept pull requests or respond to issues after this."

With this HAXM 7.8 release it now enables the XSAVE feature in CPUID, enables use of the INVPCID instruction, improves the CPUID module implementation, fixes a possible host crash, and improves the installer user experience. Binaries are available for Windows and macOS.

Thus those still making use of Intel HAXM can go ahead and download this farewell release from GitHub.