ARM Emulator

[mateli]

Running ARM Mac or iOS applikations on x86 requires emulation of user mode instructions on recent processors.

Such an emulator can share libraries and other code with darwin but loading and running executables are obviously going to be very different.

The disadvantage of an emulator is that running arm code will be significantly slower than running native code.

However there will be significant advantages.

• Full sandboxing (think DosBox)
• Run ARM Darwin applications on any platform
• Written entirely in a high level language (C/C++/Go/Rust or even Java) for reliability an rapid development.
• Optimize libraries for host platforms
• Easy per instruction debugging with visualization of internal CPU states
• Virtual threads (May in some situations be significantly faster than native threads)

I'm going to start working on this soon. First step will be to load simple binaries into memory and learning the binary formats

Binary translation will not be on the table for this project although there are other potential optimizations

Looking forward to all kinds of hints on how to do this.

[amgdev9]

Im really interested on seeing progress on this! What are you planning to use for the emulator, qemu, unicorn or something else?

[mateli]

Unicorn might be an option but not qemu. It all depends on how portable it is as well as how much insight I can get onto code execution.

[Lazerbeak12345]

likely dupe with #252

[mateli]

likely dupe with #252

Not really. That one is about rosetta-like binary translation. While interesting it provides a different set of features than an interpreting emulator.

[CuriousTommy]

Hey @mateli, I converted your issue into a discussion.

I'm not sure if something like this can be upstream to Darling without Darling going through a major redesign. I do want to do something similar, but I require Darling to first support syscall user dispatch (See #944 (comment) for blockers) before I integrate any emulator into Darling.