New VM Software Claims To Be 4.5x Faster Than QEMU

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 19 August 2014 at 01:55 PM EDT. 12 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
Eltechs is preparing to introduce ExaGear Desktop next month as new proprietary software for running Linux x86 software on Linux ARM using their own virtual machine technology.

Eltechs claims that ExaGear is great for running a virtual Linux x86 container on ARMv7 hardware. From there you could also run the x86 version of Wine for running x86 Windows programs on ARM hardware. This can already be done right now (using QEMU and other open-source Linux technologies for running emulated software for another CPU architecture separate from the host platform), but Eltechs claims that their binary-only solution "It is like QEMU but 4.5 times faster!"

Currently Ubuntu 12.04 and newer are supported by ExaGear desktop and there's a requirement on the binfmt_misc kernel module. Support for other distributions is said to be coming soon. ExaGear Desktop is expected to launch in September at a price of $30 USD (or pre-orders for $15).

You can learn more about this solution at Eltechs.com. It will be interesting to see if they supply us with a review sample so we can test their claims of being so much faster than QEMU. The ExaGear CEO, Vadim Gimpelson, wrote into Phoronix:
Eltechs ExaGear Desktop is a virtual machine that implements virtual x86 Linux container on ARM. ExaGear allows you to run x86 Linux applications directly on mini PCs based on ARM microprocessors simultaneously with native applications. Moreover you can run x86 Windows applications on your mini PC by installing Wine. ExaGear is similar to EMU but 4.5 times faster!

ExaGear is based on binary translation technology. However technologically sophisticated solution is simple to use. After installing ExaGear you won’t notice a difference between running x86 applications on ARM and running native ARM applications. The main feature of ExaGear is high performance.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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