Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

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> proprietary software that only does as much as qemu? Any advantages to this?

Well, they claim it's "like QEMU but 5 times faster!" but that's probably in some specific test conditions. I can't find any proof to this claim such as an independent review of their software across a variety of productive use scenarios.

> You can even run Windows applications on your ARM Mini PC using x86 Wine.

Or, wait until Microsoft finalises their x86 translation layer for Windows 10 ARM, and don't bother with running an i686 Linux distribution under emulation and running Wine within that. They don't seem to support x86_64 Linux distributions, so I wonder what they're planning to do since some distributions will be dropping i686 support soon. [0]

If you wanted to run Windows binaries on an ARM board, I can't see why you'd go for this over Windows 10 with x86 translation. No sane x86 proprietary software vendor would ever support Exagear's solution.

[0] https://www.archlinux.org/news/phasing-out-i686-support/

Their benchmarks are here:

https://eltechs.com/qemu-exagear-on-raspberry-pi/

Not vouching for them, just noting that some were published.

There's precious little detail here.

For example, one test the benchmark runs is x264 – H.264 video encoding where apparently ExaGear is an amazing 9.21 times faster than QEMU.

No frame rate mentioned for either QEMU or ExaGear, and they don't include a comparison to x264 encoding running natively (probably because it would make ExaGear look quite bad).

They also don't mention at all what QEMU options they're using. Maybe they're emulating an x86 in QEMU which lacks SIMD instructions? It's impossible to know without them publishing more information about their test methodology.

They pretty clearly layout that PARSEC is their benchmarking suite. You can see that here:

http://parsec.cs.princeton.edu/

Feel free to bug Princeton if you need specifics. I mean, I don't really care about this program, but it's not that difficult to beat qemu. Their whole thing is that they focus on accuracy and cross-platform compatibility. Both those things make optimizations difficult-at-best. If you're only coding a VM for a certain translation (x86->ARM, for instance), you can optimize like crazy.

>Or, wait until Microsoft finalises their x86 translation layer for Windows 10 ARM

ARM64, not ARMv7.

Also, from what I hear, binaries need to be compiled specifically for this - others just use a slower JIT emulator.

The Raspberry Pi 3 is ARM64 (Cortex-A53). However the Raspberry Pi foundation has thus far chosen not to ship an aarch64 version of Raspbian so software for previous Raspberry Pi units remains compatible.

The BCM2837 on the RPi 3 is ARMv8 (aarch64/ARM64). [0]

[0] https://devsidestory.com/build-a-64-bit-kernel-for-your-rasp...

Win 10 for RPi is a terrible thing. It's not windows. It just don't have GUI :)

Uh, sure it does. Whatchu talkin' about?

I did mean this "It's not Windows as most people understand it. A fresh install of Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi doesn't boot to the familiar Windows desktop. Instead, Windows 10 IoT Core will show users a single full-screen Universal Windows app. The system will only display the interface of a single app at a time, although additional software can be run in the background. Apps are loaded onto the Pi from a Windows 10 desktop machine." from http://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-on-the-raspbe...

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