Hello!
Can a Raspberry Pi 4 use qemu or some other virtualization software to run x86 programs? Is it e.g. possible to install qemu or something similar, start an x86 emulation and run julia inside it? Also, what would the speed penalties be?
Best regards and thanks in advance,
There is a distro called 'TwisterOS' that can/does, but ... YMMV
Regards
Avpx
-- For a very few, the sky's the limit. And, sometimes, not even that. (Small Gods) Sat 10056 Sep 20:25:01 GMT 1993 20:25:01 up 2 days, 3:26, 10 users, load average: 3.94, 4.00, 3.82
The nearest I've seen or used is a version of qemu distributed by PICAXE, but it may be a bit too specialised for general use. I've used it to run the PICAXE compiler/uploader to compile PICAXE BASIC on an RPi and to load the binary onto the target PICAXE chip and provide a serial link between the two, so it works well for that purpose.
-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Yes, you can use a straight emulator like DOSBox or a recompiler like qemu.
qemu-system-x86_64 will run an x86 64bit OS in such an emulation. I last ran this on a Pi 1 to run some tools which tax a modern PC and it was very very very unbelievably slow (the low RAM and slow SD card probably didn't help). A Pi4 should probably be a lot faster, although I don't know how usable it would be.
Another way is qemu's user mode emulation, where you can run a single x86 Linux program - syscalls are made to your regular ARM kernel so that part runs at full speed, while the program is emulated. The rest of your programs stay ARM and run at full speed.
Theo
But it's not virtualisation in the strict sense as that uses the processor hardware to provide virtual machines rather than simply emulating the instruction set of the 'guest' machine.
Modern x86 processors have hardware for providing virtual x86 machines. I'm not sure if ARM processors have similar abilities but it would almost certainly only be to provide virtual ARM machines.
-- Chris Green
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