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Comment by OptionX | Hacker News Reader

Any word on a compibily layer project for x86/64 like Rosetta? Seems like an important thing to have imo.

The article mentions an emulator, but it seemed to be for running games.

I also heard MS had something similar in their arm dev kit, but haven't looked much into it.

It's not just for games. FEX-EMU is used here alongside Wine/Proton to run games but it'll also run the x64 version of other things. There's other layers like Box64 that do the same thing. For Linux, a lot of the software traditionally found in repos already has an ARM version and it's not as necessary. On Windows on ARM sometimes the only way to get an ARM native version is to run the Linux version under WSL.

Windows on ARM has allowed running x86 code from launch with Windows 10 and x64 code since Windows 11.

There is Box86/box64/box32. A bit confusing but it's box86 for x86 > ARM32. Box64 for x86_64 > ARM64. And Box32 for x86 > ARM64.

I think they mention games because a lot of other software for Linux is generally open source. So a lot of times it's pretty easy to get an ARM build.

It also does a neat performance trick where it intercepts library calls and redirects them to native versions of the same library.

http://github.com/ptitSeb/box64

There's lots of responses but they miss the point. Rosetta let you run x86/64 apps without even knowing they were x86/64. Back when I ran Asahi, I searched far and wide, but Linux doesn't support that level of transparent integration. You always had to fuddle with the launch params.

qemu user mode does that

https://wiki.debian.org/QemuUserEmulation

Pedantic point, but Linux (the kernel) absolutely does. You can register an executable handler for amd64 binaries, and have Linux call that whenever one is invoked.

There is absolutely no user land infrastructure for using this in the way that Rosetta does on macOS, though. Feel free to contribute it!

You can run x86 steam games on asahi easily now. muvm makes it quite easy to run x86 binaries fairly transparently on arm.

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