Ok, here's the deal on ARMv7 emulation: it is buggy for reason we haven't determined yet.
You can test that, but you will need the following:
- first, an ARMv7-capable kernel image, it's name must end in "-armv7"
- second, an ARMv7 system image
- third, launch the emulator with "emulator -kernel /path/to/your-kernel-armv7 <other-options>
The -armv7 suffix on the kernel image is used as a trick to toggle emulation of a Cortex-A8 (it really only adds -qemu -cpu cortex-a8 to the command line sent internally to qemu).
You can search for "armv7" in external/qemu/android/main.c to see what I mean.
Instructions to rebuild the kernel from sources are the same than external/qemu/docs/KERNEL.TXT
except that you must select the "goldfish_armv7_defconfig" configuration instead.
There are very subtle ARMv7 emulation bugs that prevent us from running the ARMv7 system images we currently build in the emulator.
We tracked a very nasty bug in the ITSTATE CPU state emulation, but there are also other stuff dangling, hence the reason why this is
not officially supported at the moment.
Hope this helps.