Ryan Houdek
7937b7e52d
Test behaviour themselves not changed at all, just data moved or aligned. For tests that aren't explicitly testing out SMC behaviour, we were accidentally relying on some aggressive SMC tracking by mixing data and code in the same page. To fix this just align the test's data to the next page boundary which means FEX's SMC tracking won't get triggered since it is no longer living in the same page. This has been a thorn for a while, so just get rid of it. We obviously still have ASM tests that still exist that /do/ rely on SMC, and those are still expected to work.
FEX: Emulate x86 Programs on ARM64
FEX allows you to run x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices, similar to qemu-user and box64. It offers broad compatibility with both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, and it can be used alongside Wine/Proton to play Windows games.
It supports forwarding API calls to host system libraries like OpenGL or Vulkan to reduce emulation overhead. An experimental code cache helps minimize in-game stuttering as much as possible. Furthermore, a per-app configuration system allows tweaking performance per game, e.g. by skipping costly memory model emulation. We also provide a user-friendly FEXConfig GUI to explore and change these settings.
Prerequisites
FEX requires ARMv8.0+ hardware. It has been tested with the following Linux distributions, though others are likely to work as well:
- Arch Linux
- Fedora Linux
- openSUSE
- Ubuntu 22.04/24.04/24.10/25.04
An x86-64 RootFS is required and can be downloaded using our FEXRootFSFetcher tool for many distributions.
For other distributions you will need to generate your own RootFS (our wiki page might help).
Quick Start
For Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 24.10 and 25.04
Execute the following command in the terminal to install FEX through a PPA.
curl --silent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/main/Scripts/InstallFEX.py | python3
This command will walk you through installing FEX through a PPA, and downloading a RootFS for use with FEX.
For other Distributions
Follow the guide on the official FEX-Emu Wiki here.
Navigating the Source
See the Source Outline for more information.