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Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

github.com

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Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#11

Post by sharpneli »

snvzz wrote: post #9

Nice progress towards making x86 redundant. Too bad it targets ARM and not rv64gc, but it's a start. I'm curious why it isn't based on qemu-user.

In addition of Risc-V not being generally available for consumers the currently available dev boards are hilariously slow compared to ARM.

It’s bit like arm and x86 15 years ago. There is not even a contest between them. Only in the later years with the new 64bit arm cores it’s getting there, heck the latest Apple chips actually beat Intel ones in IPC.

EDIT: The emulator doesn’t have anything arm specific. It will work on anything 32bit and little-endian.

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#12

Post by daneel_w »

"App player". That's a really curious term. Is there any chance this will run on 64-bit Arm cores in the near future? I may have gotten the wrong impression, but from the past few years that I've perused the market of Arm SBCs - including the incredible variety of highly affordable Chinese "Android TV boxes" - it seems that 32-bit Arm has more or less left the building already.

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#13

Post by daneel_w »

snvzz wrote: post #9

Nice progress towards making x86 redundant. Too bad it targets ARM and not rv64gc, but it's a start. I'm curious why it isn't based on qemu-user.

I understand your perspective, but I think it's GREAT that it targets Arm. If anything finally can and finally should replace x86/64, to usher in a new era of power-efficient computing, it should be Arm.

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#15

Post by [deleted] »

daneel_w wrote: post #12

"App player". That's a really curious term. Is there any chance this will run on 64-bit Arm cores in the near future? I may have gotten the wrong impression, but from the past few years that I've perused the market of Arm SBCs - including the incredible variety of highly affordable Chinese "Android TV boxes" - it seems that 32-bit Arm has more or less left the building already.

[deleted]

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#16

Post by jdonald »

jbverschoor wrote: post #5

How does this compare to the ish.app Linux emu for iOS? I’d love tinker with using my iPhone as my workstation. Airplay or av-cable, usb keyboard

Good question. iSH appears to be a true emulator with syscall translation much like qemu-user, so it's versatile but wouldn't run a game library like SDL natively.

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#17

Post by jdonald »

d--b wrote: post #14

Question: does anyone know if this can be used to run chrome / Netflix on a raspberry pi?

I guess it's theoretically possible to emulate the x86 Widevine DRM plugin while running other browser code natively.

However, there's already an easier way to run Netflix on a Pi 4 natively. Someone figured out to just to grab the armv7l libwidevine binary from Chrome OS: https://blog.vpetkov.net/2019/07/12/netflix-and-spotify-on-a...

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#18

Post by jdonald »

daneel_w wrote: post #12

"App player". That's a really curious term. Is there any chance this will run on 64-bit Arm cores in the near future? I may have gotten the wrong impression, but from the past few years that I've perused the market of Arm SBCs - including the incredible variety of highly affordable Chinese "Android TV boxes" - it seems that 32-bit Arm has more or less left the building already.

Good question. ptitSeb's work tends to target armv7 as that's the architecture used by OpenPandora.

I don't know if this design currently depends on specifics of the armhf ABI vs aarch64.

With regard to the market, 64-bit SBCs (such as Raspberry Pi 4) often run 32-bit operating systems such as Raspbian. Even 64-bit ARM operating systems such as Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Manjaro are capable of running 32-bit software such as this via multiarch, chroot, or containers.

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#19

Post by jdonald »

snvzz wrote: post #9

Nice progress towards making x86 redundant. Too bad it targets ARM and not rv64gc, but it's a start. I'm curious why it isn't based on qemu-user.

> I'm curious why it isn't based on qemu-user.

I've also wondered what it would take to do multi-architecture dynamic linking in qemu-user. Such a capability would avoid one shortcoming of Box86, the current lack of dynamic recompilation.

I suspect that modifying QEMU in this way is not trivial.

Re: Box86, an x86 app player for ARM with native rendering performance

#20

Post by dTal »

daneel_w wrote: post #13
snvzz wrote: post #9

Nice progress towards making x86 redundant. Too bad it targets ARM and not rv64gc, but it's a start. I'm curious why it isn't based on qemu-user.

I understand your perspective, but I think it's GREAT that it targets Arm. If anything finally can and finally should replace x86/64, to usher in a new era of power-efficient computing, it should be Arm.

Just curious why you think that? ARM cores can sip power when idle, but the story for performance-per-watt under load appears less clear.
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