FEX-Emu 2207 Continues Work On Running Steam Play Games On 64-bit Arm

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FEX-Emu 2207 Continues Work On Running Steam Play Games On 64-bit Arm

FEX-Emu is an open-source emulator project that has been particularly focused on being able to run x86/x86_64 games on AArch64 with great speed including around Steam and Steam Play (Proton) Windows games...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FEX-Emu-2207

[rene]

updated: https://t2sde.org/packages/fex

[ms178]

It is not hard to imagine a future where we run x86-64/Windows games on 64-bit Arm/Linux albeit I guess that emulating the ISA- and OS-level might cost a lot of performance. If that time comes however, I hope that game developers will ship native ARM binaries sooner rather than later. Emulators are better than nothing, but it is only a bridging technology to a native-only world.

[Developer12]

It is not hard to imagine a future where we run x86-64/Windows games on 64-bit Arm/Linux albeit I guess that emulating the ISA- and OS-level might cost a lot of performance. If that time comes however, I hope that game developers will ship native ARM binaries sooner rather than later. Emulators are better than nothing, but it is only a bridging technology to a native-only world.

ISA emulation is unavoidable when going cross-architecture, but there's absolutely no reason you need to emulate the OS. Many of these emulators simply convert x86 syscalls into ARM syscalls and pass them on the ARM kernel. With Hangover and similar, even most of wine/proton (windows emulation) can live on the ARM side.

[ms178]

Thanks for that insightful remark. My expectations are high though, as I expect games to run at least at similar performance levels than the x86-native Windows version to consider switching.

[Developer12]

Thanks for that insightful remark. My expectations are high though, as I expect games to run at least at similar performance levels than the x86-native Windows version to consider switching.

The x86-windows to x86-linus conversion at this point has a nearly insignificant difference in performance these days. When translating from x86 to ARM, it's going to depend a lot on the performance of the ARM CPU in question.

That's one reason the Asahi linux effort is exciting. It's easily the most powerful ARM game in town.

[rabcor]

That's one reason the Asahi linux effort is exciting. It's easily the most powerful ARM game in town.

But it's all software accelerated, they haven't gotten the gpu working at all. And knowing the history of open source gpu drivers, I am anything but optimistic about that.

[dragon321]

But it's all software accelerated, they haven't gotten the gpu working at all. And knowing the history of open source gpu drivers, I am anything but optimistic about that.

They are working on that and making progress. Writing driver for GPU is not easy task so it needs time. One of Asahi Linux developers (Alyssa Rosenzweig) also worked on Panfrost driver for Mali GPU. Knowing how already it is usable for some hardware I'm pretty optimistic about open source driver for M1 (or even M2 later) GPU. Apple isn't blocking their hardware from third party drivers so Asahi Linux developers can progress with their work just fine.

[Developer12]

But it's all software accelerated, they haven't gotten the gpu working at all. And knowing the history of open source gpu drivers, I am anything but optimistic about that.

The GPU's already running on open source drivers. Has been for weeks now.

They have a prototype driver that's been stitched together with bits of mesa (the userspace portion of the driver is nearly complete) as well as python over USB2.0 to drive the hardware through a bootloader debug interface.

The last couple of days they've been resolving all outstanding questions (how the queues work, how exceptions work, how the TLB works) so some time next week they should start writing the linux kernel space part of the driver. At the rate they've been going, I wouldn't be surprised if they had an alpha version of the full openGL driver by the middle of august.

[rabcor]

Well that's good to hear then. Still can't quite get optimisitic about it but at least i can see the hope.