[tambourine_man]

This is some very cool hacking, but I’m more interested in knowing how Apple Silicon will run x86 Windows and Linux stuff. Can virtualization software get help from Rosetta 2? Or is QEMU and similar the best we can hope for?

[my123]

For Linux guests:

_If you really need to_, Huawei provides the ExaGear Server translator for Linux at https://www.huaweicloud.com/kunpeng/software/exagear.html , which allows to run x86 and x86_64 apps on an arm64 Linux system, including Docker containers for their customers. That translator works pretty well in most cases.

Note however that you need to create a Huawei account to download this.

For Windows guests:

Run arm64 Windows, the JITs to run x86(_64) apps are included with the OS.

The VHDX for virtual machine use can be downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsins...

[skissane]

Why use ExaGear, why not just use qemu-user-static?

Why would I want to use a (presumably) closed-source solution from Huawei whose documentation is only in Chinese, when I could instead use a well-known open source project with plentiful documentation in English?

[my123]

It's because Qemu is several orders of magnitude slower, it's not even in the same class of solution.

FEX is an experimental open-source solution at https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX, but it's still in heavy development.

[skissane]

> Qemu is several orders of magnitude slower, it's not even in the same class of solution

Why? QEMU has a JIT

[my123]

Long story... Qemu's JIT is really not what you want for high performance. TCG is much more geared towards portability as a goal.

[metafex]

Exagear is originally from the Russian company Eltechs and was targeted to running x86 apps on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. e.g. they provided Ubuntu images with wine to run windows apps on a Pi.

They discontinued the product beginning of 2019 and presumably? got bought by Huawei.

[my123]

And since then the product changed a lot. They target Arm 64-bit machines only nowadays and support both x86 32-bit _and_ 64-bit application compatibility.

[floatboth]

I'm pretty sure it can, they demoed running x86 Windows on the previous keynote.

[tambourine_man]

I don’t think so, it was linux on ARM running an http server if I’m not mistaken

[floatboth]

They showed both Windows and Debian, and I'm pretty sure said nothing about the architecture of the Debian, but the Windows was amd64.

[tambourine_man]

Please provide a link. Here’s what they have shown on the last WWDC:

https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6114