Android Studio: /dev/kvm device permission denied
When I try to run my Android app on an emulator I get this error:
/dev/kvm permission denied.
I checked the permissions and added the user I am currently logged in with to the kvm group. What is wrong?
Answer
As mentioned in the comments, starting with Ubuntu 18.04 and Linux Mint Tara you need to first sudo apt install qemu-kvm.
To check the ownership of /dev/kvm use
ls -al /dev/kvm
The user was root, the group kvm. To check which users are in the kvm group, use
grep kvm /etc/group
This returned
kvm:x:some_number:
on my system: as there is nothing rightwards of the final :, there are no users in the kvm group.
To add your user to the kvm group, you could use
sudo adduser $USER kvm
which adds the user to the group, and check once again with grep kvm /etc/group.
As mentioned by @marcolz, the command newgrp kvm should change the group membership live for you. If that did not work, @Knossos mentioned that you might want to log out and back in (or restart), for the permissions to take effect. Or do as @nmirceac mentioned and re-login in the same shell via su - $USER.