Hi all
I'm wondering, as there are a few pcs of software that are not available for ARM, is it somehow possible to emulate x86 under arm64/linux? Don't care about performance in this regard, only to be able to run a few apps.
Cheers!
You should be able to use qemu's userspace emulation to run 32 and 64 bit x86 apps, but it requires carrying around the full library dependencies for x86 as well.
I've measured qemu's performance running x86_64 on aarch64 as about 10% of native performance, so it's slow, but it does work.
Unfortunately, I've also found problems with things like spotify - I can't get it working right, even though there's an x86 Linux client. :/ It crashes on startup and I've not had the time to troubleshoot it.
It depends what kind of apps do you need. If you are talking about retro games, you can run Dosbox quite fine and also PCem seems to run fine even with Windows 98. I am just playing with it and testing which hardware is the best to emulate for Win98 and similar systems.
Eight Bit; Never used Docker, have looked at it but feeling kind of confused. I'll keep looking into it.
I did try to compile the box86 on the PineBook tho, but gave errors and could not compile.
Syonyk; Okay, well, I don't mind a performance drop, but 10% might be a bit to bad..
Wizzard; Dosbox runs fine, but in this case there are a few apps I want to run which are native on Linux (Ledger Live for example).
The 10% was actually over on a Jetson Nano, so different aarch64 hardware. I've got it on my list to get running on the PBP, both a 32 and 64 bit chroot, just haven't had time to do it yet. I couldn't get Spotify to run, but that's an electron app, so it's using Chrome, so it's not exactly light. I was getting weird errors on early startup and then the whole thing just crashed.
Eight Bit; Been testing docker out and docker seems very interesting, I'm surely going to be using this in the future (thanks!). Seems lovely to be basically have a whole server/website in a container and never have to worry about moving it around if need be, but- after installing docker on the PineBook, and pulling debian for example, I notice all the packages from apt are for arm64. Is this because docker and host is sharing kernel? Or is there any way to get x86/64 repos available for a pulled distro in docker?
