Box64 0.3.0: x86_64 emulator for Linux supports AVX and AVX2
Box64 emulates x64_64 CPUs in non-x86 Linux versions. The new version 0.3.0 supports the vector instruction set extensions AVX and AVX2.
(Image: Box64)
Box64 is an emulator for Linux that can run Intel software - such as games - on non-x86_64 hardware such as ARM64 systems. The recently released version 0.3.0 of Box64 supports vector command extensions such as AVX and AVX2. This should allow more software to run, and even faster.
The release notes for Box64 version 0.3.0 emphasize in particular the AVX and AVX2 support, whereby other extensions such as BMI1, BMI2, ADX, FMA, F16C and RDANDR have also found their way into the emulator. The use of the extensions can be controlled with an environment variable. If BOX64_AVX is set to 1, this activates the AVX, BMI1, F16C and VAES extensions, while the value 2 additionally activates AVX2, BMI2, FMA, ADX, VPCLMULQDQ and RDRAND.
Dynamic recompilation
In order to have more steam for the apps running in emulation, Box64 supports "Dynarec", i.e. the dynamic recompilation of programs. The recompiler has also learned the AVX and AVX2 instructions and can translate them into ARM's vector instruction extension NEON. Box64 builds for ARM64 therefore have AVX and AVX2 enabled by default for Dynarec.
The release notes list several other minor changes. Support for some CPUID opcodes has been optimized, which improves CPU detection. The Dynarec compiler has received some corrections for ARM64 opcodes, as well as support for the Chinese Loongson 64 processor architecture. RISCV-64 support has also been extended: some new opcodes have been added and many have been corrected. The infrastructure to support RISCV vector instruction extensions for SIMD emulation has been extended. Many small changes and corrections have been made to the handling of x87 (mathematical coprocessor of x86 CPUs), registers and internal jumps.
Other improvements include support for Wayland. Wine-wayland now runs, the developers report.
The current version of Box64 is available as source code on Github. As the infrastructure for building Debian packages is created there, the new version should also be available for installation directly in the repositories of the common distributions in the near future.
(dmk)
