I am using android studio with VM. After running some emulators I noticed that I still have a process named qemu-system-x86_64 running which occupies 1.9GB of my RAM (I am running the emulator with software support only).
To load it using qemu one needs to call make run which is equivalent to creating a floppy image and calling qemu-system-i386 -fda afterwards. More on Makefiles here and here. -fda means the first floppy disk found in the system (floppy disk a).