I installed Android SDK and Android Studio on my new ThinkPad T470s with Ubuntu Linux 18.04.1 LTS. As usual, I wanted to create a new Android phone emulator called AVD (Android Virtual Device). I was able to create a new device, but unfortunately I encoutered problems. After opening AVD window, I saw the error message…
/dev/kvm is not found
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). In order to enable KVM, I needed to restart the computer and enter the BIOS by pressing F1 key before the system boot. Next, I entered Security tab and enabled Intel Virtualization Technology and Intel VT-d Feature. Now, I could press F10 to save, exit nad restart the computer. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. I saw another error message…
/dev/kvm device permission denied
Luckily, I found answer to this issue on StackOverflow. I just needed to install qemu-kvm and add my user to the kvm group.
I installed required software:
sudo apt install qemu-kvm
Then, checked the ownership of /dev/kvm:
ls -al /dev/kvm
The user was root, the group kvm. To check which users are in the kvm group, I could use:
grep kvm /etc/group
This returned:
kvm:x:some_number:
As there is nothing left to the final :, there are no users in the kvm group.
To add the user username to the kvm group, I could use:
sudo adduser username kvm
I can check my username, by typing:
whoami
Now, I could check group members once again with:
grep kvm /etc/group
My user should be there. Next, I could just restart the machine, create new AVD, start it and everything worked! I could finally use my Android emulator. Optionally, if you still have a problem, you can call the following command:
sudo chown username /dev/kvm
and replace username with your username