GitHub Actions: Hardware accelerated Android virtualization now available

Available now, Actions users of our 2-vCPU GitHub-hosted Linux runners will be able to make use of hardware acceleration for Android testing. Previously this feature was only available on runners with 4 or more vCPUs.

To make use of this on Linux, Actions users will need to add the runner user to the KVM user group

      - name: Enable KVM group perms
        run: |
            echo 'KERNEL=="kvm", GROUP="kvm", MODE="0666", OPTIONS+="static_node=kvm"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-kvm4all.rules
            sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
            sudo udevadm trigger --name-match=kvm

      - name: Enable KVM group perms
        run: |
            echo 'KERNEL=="kvm", GROUP="kvm", MODE="0666", OPTIONS+="static_node=kvm"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-kvm4all.rules
            sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
            sudo udevadm trigger --name-match=kvm

You will then be able to make use of hardware acceleration when making use of Android emulator actions such as reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner.

For more information on how to set-up hardware acceleration, please see our documentation.