Emulator brings x86 Linux apps to ARM devices


Nice to see any progress here.

I did open up a thread with Eltechs Exagear already here.

Maybe we could make a special deal to get it for Pyra (if required) or offer it on an official SD-Card.
 
"4.5 times faster than QEMU"

I believe it. My crappy fork of QEMU is over 2x faster on floating point, even if it's not always as accurate. My WIP one will probably be even faster (and actually accurate). When we asked the QEMU team about native floating point, they brushed it off saying something like "accuracy is far more important to us than performance".

I wonder if they figured out the OpenGL problem (but I doubt it, so this is probably software-rendered-only). 75% of native performance is a ballsy claim. I'd bet it doesn't hold true for every workload. I'm mostly curious how well they do on floating point there.

I emailed them a huge list of questions about floating point, OpenGL, asking them to run more benchmarks, dwarf fortress, etc. I'll post back here if they respond.

I think the fact they compiled sysbench with -msse3 is a slight red flag, because it means they might suck at stock x87 floating point emulation. SSE3 maps far more easily to NEON afaik, but it's a way newer standard so the older games aren't as likely to be using it.

Looks like you can get a server with eltechs running on it, so I might spin one up and see how it does: http://www.armasaservice.com/order.aspx?src=hero
 
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Wow interresting...


..and i think it belongs to the Benchmark too.


Do you renember what for Speed i got with Norton Sysinfo on Pandora?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_WNVRzPh6N0?feature=oembed
(Sysinfo Speed was never the real Emulated speed)


We will see what here comes out ;)


Interresting Project,but i dont expect too much from this ;)


Edit:


Renember...we have tested many many Qemu Versions and 0.1.5.1 was the fastest ever.


I believe that they say faster than Qemu and i understand that they mean "faster than actual Qemu"...


...but we have a very Pandora optimized Version and all newer Qemu Versions are very slower than the Version we use here ;)


sorry for my bad English again.
 
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I got some answers back from them:
 

This is user-mode emulation, best compared against qemu-user and Apple's Rosetta, right? (I'm assuming so by the binfmt_misc requirement).
 Yes. You are right.

Did you get OpenGL working? Did you get OpenGL ES working? If not, do you want help with this?
 
Really we forward directly all syscalls and use ARM X-server. So if OpenGL go through them and there are compatibility all should work. We ran Q3 arena and it works but show just several FPS. But to be honest we did not deep in this performance gap at the moment. We expect it might be problem with host(ARM) Ubuntu like absent of driver.


It looks like you ran sysbench with SSE3 instructions, which unfortunately many old closed-source pieces of software won't support. SSE is also likely far easier to emulate on ARM, because you don't need 80-bit x87 extended precision numbers, and you don't need to emulate the x87 floating point stack. Can you also post a sysbench run that's compiled without SSE support?

Can you try running Dwarf Fortress on it? (This is one of the most processor intensive 32-bit x86 Linux games, with no ARM equivalent, and it's even text-mode so it's a great candidate for emulation tests.).
 I'll forward your requests to our QA team.


Which Intel CPU features or specific CPU do you most closely emulate?
 We emulate x86 ISA upto SSE4.2. It corresponds early Core i3/5/7 processors.
 
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Hm, I'm not using Linux on the Desktop. Which "x86 Linux apps" are good and worth to be run onto the Pandora/Pyra? ^^
WINE, Dwarf Fortress, Steam, stuff like Xilinx developer tools
 
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Unreal Tournament, Heretic II, some other Loki games era stuff.
 
If it is not open source, then it makes sense to use such an Emulator, indeed. Unreal Tournament sounds good for example, didn't knew it has an official Linux port. I know it's still not open source, sadly so this project here could be an option if it runs faster than under WINE for example. I still have my (Windows) UT GOTY edition, would be fun to be able to play this mobile, no matter which version is used. :)
 
This project should also be faster than WINE under QEMU and faster than Windows in QEMU. I'm pretty excited :)
 
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Seeing as they list Ubuntu as requirement it, probably won't work out of the box on our devices, right? I signed up for pre-order there as I'm pretty excited about it if it keeps its promises.
I just hope some with good Linux knowledge (as opposed to me) will make it run here somehow. :)
 
Pyra will probably be running a more compatible distro in general, but same idea anyway.
 
Skype. I don't even care about calls or audio/video, I use Skype for chatting with friends over text. I would love that on the Pyra.
 
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