* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19389120
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19400920
I think there are a couple factors that have limited the awareness of Box86. One is having the word "Box" in its title which reminds too much of existing solutions DOSBox or Bochs that already do their job.
The second is occasionally headlining Box86 as an "emulator", taking into account that most of the audience does not get very far into the article. Even if Box86 does use x86 emulation it's important to highlight that libraries like OpenGL and SDL run natively. Compare that framing to WINE, which is so forthcoming on not being an emulator that it's in the name.
I’d love tinker with using my iPhone as my workstation. Airplay or av-cable, usb keyboard
I don't know if this design currently depends on specifics of the armhf ABI vs aarch64.
With regard to the market, 64-bit SBCs (such as Raspberry Pi 4) often run 32-bit operating systems such as Raspbian. Even 64-bit ARM operating systems such as Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Manjaro are capable of running 32-bit software such as this via multiarch, chroot, or containers.
https://www.gog.com/game/world_of_goo (was also free on Epic Game Store a while ago, plus in a million different bundles)
for example.
The games used as tests seem to be lower end indie titles that can be found DRM-free (because you don't also want to have to work around that)
However, there's already an easier way to run Netflix on a Pi 4 natively. Someone figured out to just to grab the armv7l libwidevine binary from Chrome OS: https://blog.vpetkov.net/2019/07/12/netflix-and-spotify-on-a...
Too bad it targets ARM and not rv64gc, but it's a start.
I'm curious why it isn't based on qemu-user.
It’s bit like arm and x86 15 years ago. There is not even a contest between them. Only in the later years with the new 64bit arm cores it’s getting there, heck the latest Apple chips actually beat Intel ones in IPC.
EDIT: The emulator doesn’t have anything arm specific. It will work on anything 32bit and little-endian.
I've also wondered what it would take to do multi-architecture dynamic linking in qemu-user. Such a capability would avoid one shortcoming of Box86, the current lack of dynamic recompilation.
I suspect that modifying QEMU in this way is not trivial.
