Box86/Box64 Blog

You could have a look at box86 and box64: https://box86.org/ | https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64 I haven't tried them myself, but I've read consistent testimony that the performance (and compatibility) is great.

Yup it’s confirmed to be a milk-v pioneer on the link from the embedded video page https://box86.org/2026/01/new-box64-v0-4-0-released/ Definitely not the latest and greatest RISC-V, interestingly a new Milk-V board was announced quite recently which will use the new spacemit K3 chip.

How's it different from box86/box64? It also has RISC-V with JIT support. https://box86.org/

Blink seems to be closer to qemu-user or box86/box64[0]. 0. https://box86.org/

Huh. I wonder if this uses https://box86.org/ or such, like proton uses wine

The basics are here: https://box86.org/ It is an emulator but: > Because box86 uses the native versions of some “system” libraries, like libc, libm, SDL, and OpenGL, it’s easy to integrate and use with most applications, and performance can be surprisingly high in some cases. Wine can also be compiled/run as native.

You can also run x86 32bit binaries on the Pi with box86: https://box86.org/ Surprisingly performant and very impressive.

Despite the progress here, for me it raises a question: Most of the old games she mentions are x86 32bit games. What's the story for how these programs are actually going to run in Asahi? Box86 [1] doesn't sound like it's projected to run on M1. Rosetta 2 on macOS allows 32-bit code to be run by a 64-bit process, which is the workaround CrossOver et. al. use (from what I understand), but that obviously won't be available? [1] https://box86.org

Not to be confused with https://box86.org/

Until last week, I had a full Debian amd64 systemd container to run invidious on an ARM64 machine (a ROCKpro64) running Armbian, since crystal (the language in which Invidious is written) does not have arm64 Debian packages. There's nothing special to make this work, regular commands work, for instance just running systemd-nspawn -b in an arm64 root folder works. Now I found a way to get arm64 crystal binaries. I got rid of the container, but Invidious still cross compiles to amd64, so qemu is still used to run an amd64 build Invidious of transparently. binfmt and qemu-user do wonders. It works well. One could use box64 [1] instead of qemu and it should provide better performance because it uses the native versions of some well known libraries (including libc6) instead of emulating them, but I failed to compile box64 this weekend so I stayed with qemu. [1] https://box86.org/ | https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/

There are already compatibility layers for x86 on RISC-V. They’re not quite as good, but progress is being made. Edit, link: https://box86.org/2024/08/box64-and-risc-v-in-2024/

box64 if you prefer. https://box86.org/2022/03/box86-box64-vs-qemu-vs-fex-vs-rosetta2/

Answering myself: https://box86.org/2022/03/box86-box64-vs-qemu-vs-fex-vs-rosetta2/ and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32149080

Also check this! :) https://box86.org/2022/12/box64-on-asahi-with-experimental-gpu-driver/

Box64 actually comes quite close to Rosetta in terms of translation speed and apparently that's with optimizations which have yet to be implemented[0]. Would make sense to just use that instead. [0] https://box86.org/2022/03/box86-box64-vs-qemu-vs-fex-vs-rosetta2/