What is the MIPS system image in the Android SDK manager?

Question

In each SDK, I have a solution to install MIPS system image .

What is it? What does he do and when does someone use it? What happens if I do not install it?

Answer 1

What is it?

This is an emulator image that emulates a device with an MIPS processor instead of an ARM or x86 processor.

What does he do and when does someone use it?

You will use it if you want to emulate a device with an MIPS processor instead of an ARM or x86 processor.

What happens if I do not install it?

You cannot emulate a device with a MIPS processor instead of an ARM or x86 processor. The MIPS consortium may cry. But, given that there are very few Android devices with MIPS processors on the market right now, the MIPS emulator is probably just fine.

More information on MIPS architecture can be found here: http://www.mips.com/

Answer 2

In my opinion, you need system images for MIPS and x86 only to test your own code, which was developed using the "Native Development Kit" (NDK) .

An x86 image can be performed with higher performance if your processor offers virtualization support (for example, Intel VTx, AMD-V for Linux only), see this section in the official documentation. According to this discussion , the emulator will write that “HAX works, and the emulator works in fast virt mode” to the console if it uses CPU virtualization support.

However, if the emulator runs too fast, the developer may forget that the application should also work with sufficient performance on a mobile device with limited resources ...

Answer 3

Oddly enough, the MIPS System Image update resolved the build problem I ran into. After updating all components except MIPS System Image, all my projects could not build with errors, saying that "R cannot be resolved by a variable." After updating MIPS System Image, everything is going well.