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Emulator Now Runs x86 Apps On All Raspberry Pi Models
DeviceGuru writes: Russia-based Eltechs announced its ExaGear Desktop virtual machine last August, enabling Linux/ARMv7 SBCs and mini-PCs to run x86 software. That meant that users of the quad-core, Cortex-A7-based Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, could use it as well, although the software was not yet optimized for it. Now Eltechs has extended extended ExaGear to support earlier ARMv6 versions of the Raspberry Pi. The company also optimized the emulator for the Pi 2 allowing, for example, Pi 2 users to use automatically forwarding startup scripts.
ExaGear is extremely fast. You can achieve almost native performance. Take a look on benchs on http://eltechs.com/product/exa...
The first ARM desktop computer, the Acorn Archimedes, got quite early on a PC emulator which, if I recall correctly, emulated a 80186. The ARM 2 processor, running at 8 MHz could emulate this processor at close to 5-6 MHz (again, if I recall correctly).
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I think it's a big deal to Russia since they don't have access to Intel/AMD cpu's, so they're basing their homegrown computers on ARM. Anyone using an ARM based computer probably wants to run some x86 software sometimes. I think the design goals for Boch's and ExaGear is different, people using ARM based computers would like access to all the x86 software available. It doesn't seem like Boch's is compiled for ARM/Android yet so that's a huge group that's not being serviced, so it's kind of a big deal.
I wouldn't bother. Just use QEMU. It's slower but it works.
I don't think proprietary software is worthwile on Linux. No, I'm not an RMS type that would completely boycott proprietary anything on philosphical grounds. It's just that my experience is that if I can't compile it from source on Linux it sucks.
First... you have to be running the same distro as the author or.. no support and maybe a 40% chance it will even work.
Ok, for the Pi everything is probably Raspbian so that might not be a problem.
But.. a year later... it doesn't work if you download any updates because it is dependant on some old library version or the distro has moved some file or something like that.
If you get source code... just recompile and it works. You get about 5 years before Linux has changed too much to use that same source code without modification.
Get a community to maintain the source code... it's more like 25 years.
Now.. proprietary software on Windows.. 10 to 20 years before you can't use it anymore.