QEMU vs Android emulator: command line options

Question

What are differences regarding command line options between stock QEMU and Android emulator?

Is there an option that has the same syntax, but works differently between the two? Or similar gotchas..

Answer 1

Android emulator is built atop qemu, so basically android emulator inherits all the features from qemu and gets more specific options for android. From the view of the command line, android emulator is more like a wrapper. It looks like:

emulator <options-for-android> -qemu <options-for-qemu>

You can refer the code in file main-emulator.c in the folder of android emulator. In there, you will see that all the options will be parsed and sent to the main function of vl-android.c, which is the entry point of a modified qemu.

Answer 2

You can also observe which options are given to QEMU with -verbose: How to show which options are passed to QEMU when launching the android emulator?

Comparing to qemu-system-x86_64 -help, there are some Android specific options there.

The location of the Android emulator source code has been asked at: Modifying Android emulator source code