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ptitSeb
box86
C2019–2023
ptitSeb / box86

box86

Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM Linux devices

18Distinct people
21Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
3.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM Linux devices

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

It definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had…

spijdar used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year21 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-09-14 22:20:45 UTC to 2023-09-13 20:27:29 UTC.

02468102019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211

What Hacker News says

6 sources
> Docker w/ arm linux kernel + x86 userland images: I don't what existing projects might me candidates, but any translation solution would be found within the linux guestOS, not macOS. That could be something doing dynarec like box86, which is mindboggingly the only way to run (x86) Zoom on a arm7hf Linux atop a Raspberry Pi 4 (I tried it on a Pi3B: it works but it’s way too slow) https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In Docker fails to launch on Apple Silicon
Upstream which part exactly? The library thunking stuff wasn't included in any of the projects involved, so I couldn't upstream that. My glshim project was most of the work involved and is still around and still capable of proxying opengl through a usermode emulator, and rendering fixed function GL via GL ES or software rendering. My performance changes to QEMU would definitely not have been accepted based on sentiment when talking to the QEMU core team at the time. My changes to WINE were extremely minimal (read the commits) and don't make sense to live in WINE unless you mash together a dual arch WINE distribution in the exact same, manual, way I did, so they don't make much sense to upstream. A sort of spiritual successor to my work here is https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 which is more like the OP and does HLE.
In Hangover, Win64/Win32 applications on arm64/ppc64le/x86_64 Linux and x86_64 Mac
Windows ARM seems to be a bit faster than that running x86. An older video showed pretty good performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRBMBkL7SCM . Using an abstraction layer to convert system library calls to call native ARM system libraries instead so you don't have to emulate x86 versions of the system libraries. This is the same concept box86 implements on Linux. https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 . It's good enough to run lower end Linux games on a Raspberry Pi 4
In Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple ditching Intel

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