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Emulator Now Runs x86 Apps On All Raspberry Pi Models

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

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.

6 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. I'm having flashbacks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm having flashbacks to Windows NT 4.0 on the alpha running X86 apps. Oh God those were terrible times!

  2. Re:And the news is... by eltechs457 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ExaGear is extremely fast. You can achieve almost native performance. Take a look on benchs on http://eltechs.com/product/exa...

  3. History repeats itself... by John+Bokma · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

    --

    Perl Programmer for hire
  4. Re:And the news is... by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sounds about right... QEMU isn't designed to be fast, it's designed to be accurate and portable. so writing a pipelined JIT x86 emulator specifically for ARM should get around a 4x speedup over QEMU even if it is solely based on QEMU code and a JIT engine, prior to optimization.

  5. Re:And the news is... by dosius · · Score: 3, Informative

    Huh? Last I checked, qemu WAS designed to be fast - or at least compared to Bochs, which isn't saying much, it was intended to be fast. Or are you confusing the two?

    --
    What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
  6. No source, no future by morgauxo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.