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      1 This is source release of the Android emulator. simply run the "build-emulator.sh" script to
      2 generate a statically linked "emulator" binary in the current directory.
      3 
      4 you can also use the "--target=<path>" option to install the executable into a different location,
      5 
      6 At the moment, only Linux and Mac OS X are supported.
      7 
      8 This emulator is probably not usable without other support files provided by the Android project,
      9 like a specific kernel image, ramdisk, system and user disk images. Please go to the Android web
     10 site for more details.
     11 
     12 This emulator is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2, which can be
     13 found in the file "qemu/COPYING".
     14 
     15 it is based on QEMU 0.8.2 with many changes used to support the following features:
     16 
     17   - additionnal hardware support for some Android reference boards.
     18 
     19   - various OS-X related patches to make everything compile cleanly with GCC 4.1 and
     20     beyond. this includes better support for the Mach-O binary format
     21 
     22   - support for instruction-level profiling and data cache simulation. this allows the
     23     emulator to generate "profile" files that can later be analyzed with external tools
     24     to provide accurate information about what's happening in the system
     25 
     26   - changes in the dynamic code generators, mainly to support concurrent generators in
     27     a single binary (this allows us to use different generators for profiling and
     28     non-profiling modes, and switch between them dynamically at runtime when needed)
     29 
     30   - support for network throttling and latency simulation, used to better emulate the
     31     network conditions of radio networks.
     32 
     33   - a new graphical user interface capable of displaying and rotating "device skins"
     34 
     35   - an optional (and disabled by default) "polling" runtime mode that doesn't use
     36     SIGALRM signals to implement timers. this makes for much better timing accuracy
     37     when using "old" emukated Linux kernels, at the cost of using 100% CPU, even when
     38     the guest system is idle. This is now disabled since Linux 2.6.21 and beyond use
     39     "dynamic ticks" that make this mode un-necessary for Android.
     40 
     41 
     42 it also uses a patched version of LibSDL-1.2.15.
     43