Fedora 42 On 64-bit ARM Might Make It Seamless To Run x86/x86_64 Programs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 42 On 64-bit ARM Might Make It Seamless To Run x86/x86_64 Programs

As one of the early feature proposals for Fedora 42, there is a proposal being considered to make for a nice out-of-the-box experience running x86/x86_64 game/application binaries atop Fedora 42 AArch64 hosts...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-42-FEX-AArch64-Proposal

[Britoid]

> To address this, we will leverage krun to run FEX inside a microVM with a 4k page-size kernel, thus providing a compatible environment with minimal overhead

This sounds like a terrible idea and would just encourage software developers to not make sure their software runs on non-4K kernels.

[raystriker]

This is great. Not many people want to mess around with installing FEX on their distro.

[CuriousTommy]

I hope the proposal takes it a step further and have the Software Center offer to install the FEX Emulation layer if it detects you trying to install an x86-64 package.

[jeisom]

> To address this, we will leverage krun to run FEX inside a microVM with a 4k page-size kernel, thus providing a compatible environment with minimal overhead

This sounds like a terrible idea and would just encourage software developers to not make sure their software runs on non-4K kernels.

Most of the software that end users would use are going to be software like games on steam and applications in wine that already don't have a linux build already. This won't affect that at all. Showing that linux and linux on aarch64 is a profitable market for them is the only way that will happen.

[CuriousTommy]

> To address this, we will leverage krun to run FEX inside a microVM with a 4k page-size kernel, thus providing a compatible environment with minimal overhead

This sounds like a terrible idea and would just encourage software developers to not make sure their software runs on non-4K kernels.

I don't realistically see developers updating their x86 builds to support pages sizes other then 4k.

[OneTimeShot]

While I 100% agree that Linux should just translate and run whatever binary is thrown at it (hey - that's the entire premise of "optional" instructions on a CPU and the point of architecture labels in ELF), I'm not 100% sure why it should use FEX rather than QEMU or something else.

QEMU has been doing this for years, and supports lots of instruction sets. It also has solved the "you need an x64 root partition" issue.

[King InuYasha]

I don't realistically see developers updating their x86 builds to support pages sizes other then 4k.

16k is a page size unavailable for x86 anyway. It's just an ARM thing.

[alexenv]

While I 100% agree that Linux should just translate and run whatever binary is thrown at it (hey - that's the entire premise of "optional" instructions on a CPU and the point of architecture labels in ELF), I'm not 100% sure why it should use FEX rather than QEMU or something else.

QEMU has been doing this for years, and supports lots of instruction sets. It also has solved the "you need an x64 root partition" issue.

Easy. QEMU is slow.

[edwaleni]

Maybe Fedora can get VIA to fix that crappy VL805 USB controller under Linux. How many firmware updates since the Pi4 came out.?