Box86 Continues Quest For Running x86 Linux Programs On ARM, Other Archs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Box86 Continues Quest For Running x86 Linux Programs On ARM, Other Archs

An interesting open-source project that has been brought up now a few times by Phoronix readers is Box86 for allowing 32-bit x86 programs to run unmodified on non-x86 Linux systems like ARM...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Box86-x86-On-Other-Archs

[lucrus]

Can't wait to run qemu-system-arm on it...

[skeevy420]

Can't wait to run qemu-system-arm on it...

Yo dawg

[microcode]

Funny enough, I was just thinking about this yesterday; guess a lot of people are thinking what I'm thinking.,

DBT is a hard problem; QEMU is relatively complete but the performance is poor compared to other DBTs because it is very generic rather than very specific.

[artivision]

Apple's Rosetta-2 benchmark's at 75% native, all tho this could be due to their Arm core is fabricated to accelerate those bit wise operations.

[andrei_me]

Speaking of Rosetta2, what do we have as an open-source alternative for it, besides the already cited qemu and Box86?

As arm64 becomes more widespread to laptop costumers, be it because the apple or other efforts, such solutions become more important

[TheOne]

Speaking of Rosetta2, what do we have as an open-source alternative for it, besides the already cited qemu and Box86?

https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX

https://fex-emu.org/

[jaxa]

Box64 is in development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec3vIdpoPIM

[microcode]

https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX

https://fex-emu.org/

Wow, I was completely unaware of FEX, seems to be quite far along. I wonder how hard it would be to fork/port it to RISC-V; there is obviously some considerable work in making DBT eventually turn SIMD loops (and the surrounding front and back porches) into vectors, but the fundamentals seem not to be too crazy, they are both little-endian at least.

[microcode]

Box64 is in development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec3vIdpoPIM

I wonder how it will compare to FEX.