Since this setup didn't work out of the box on my Linux machine, and there was quite a few problems to get it to work I decided to describe the key points.

Host configuration: Debian 7.2 x64 (multiarch) / ADT v22.3 / JDK 1.7.0_45

First you need to install IA32 libraries:

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386       # if not enabled already
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

To use acceleration an x86 system image is required. I installed Android 4.3 x86 Atom system image.
Due to some strange reasons emulator window won't appear when running this image. The fix is to add -noaudio option. Acceleration is not enabled by default. To check if you system is supported:

$ egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

And then install qemu-kvm package. For more information how to configure it to work with Android emulator please see http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html#vm-linux.

Unfortunately I could not found a way to set these additional command options when launching via AVD Manager so I moved the emulator executable and wrapped it with a small shell script. sdk/tools/emulator:

#!/bin/sh
EMU="$(dirname $0)/emulator.real"
"${EMU}" "$@" -noaudio -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm

With this changes virtual devices can be started as usual with ADT's AVD Manager. After playing a little with VM on my system I can say that it is almost as fast as when using a real device.