x86 apps on R Pi

Hello all!

There is a good new for owners of the Raspberry Pi 2 - now you can run x86 apps on R Pi 2 with the virtualization engine Exagear Desktop. This engine was released last fall and is being used with different ARM boards Eltechs ExaGear Desktop

But it is limited for ARMv7 instruction set so it is not available for the first generation of Raspberry Pi. Hense this spring there will be a new release, a special version for Raspberry Pi of the first generation. You can pre-order it for $10 right now: Eltechs ExaGear Desktop for Raspberry Pi Pre-order

royleith over 10 years ago

I notice that both wine and virtualbox are listed in the Raspbian repository. Although it looks as though they are installable, I have not bothered myself. I use Wine and Virtualbox on my powerful Atom-based desktop where they do useful work. Even with the four cores and A7 on the Pi2, I think such things are more of a novelty than a utility for the Raspberry Pi.

Perhaps an emulator might be useful for running development board IDEs that are only available for Windows.
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M0DCD over 10 years ago in reply to royleith

I doubt if you'll get very far with WINE. Most Windows software is written for x86 processors, so it's not a straight swop so to speak. Trying to do two jobs at once (x86 translation and WINE) I suggest is a recipe for trouble. Are there really enough Windows programs written for ARM that would be worth it?
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Problemchild over 10 years ago

To be honest unless you ave a very specific niche that requires this emulation I would doubt you would get very far with any form of x86 emulation on ARM. 10% the speed of the host seems to be the order of the day so a100MHZ x86 will not really be too satisfactory.
in many ways it's like emulating an elephant on a mouse .....possible but not where you would really want to go !
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Former Member over 10 years ago in reply to royleith

Yea, you 're right, this emulator helps devs willing to use some utilities that not available for ARM.
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Problemchild over 10 years ago in reply to Former Member

True but there's few of those so maybe as a stop gap it would be useful in specific circumstances.
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Former Member over 10 years ago in reply to Problemchild

2John
10% of performance is for Qemu. ExaGear much more faster, something close to 50-60%. So in result you will get 400Mhz x86.
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Problemchild over 10 years ago in reply to Former Member

Are they donating a review copy I'll tell you then. Personally some optimising emulators get high values for certain code sequences I would still favour the 10-20% value. Also they would need to be very cheap as you could very quickly get to a point it would be better to run the code on a off box x86 that could be got for less than a RPI for a 2nd hand desktop chassis
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Former Member over 10 years ago in reply to Problemchild

You can ask to try via feedback form on eltechs.com
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Former Member over 10 years ago in reply to Problemchild

BTW there is a good article in Feb ODROID magazine with experience of using ExaGear on Odroid boards.
ODROID Forum • View topic - ODROID Magazine February Issue Available Now! (Docker)
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x86 apps on R Pi

2John