Box64 v0.3 Brings Support For Emulating x86_64 Binaries With AVX/AVX2 On ARM

Box64 v0.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this user-space x86_64 emulator for Linux binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) hosts. Box64 is one of several promising projects in this area for being able to run x86_64 games and applications under ARM64 with great speed.

FEX is another x86_64 on ARM64 emulator that last week saw the release of FEX 2407 with the ability to handle AVX and AVX2 Advanced Vector Extensions. Coincidentally, Box64 v0.3 adds AVX/AVX2 support too for allowing more modern x86_64 binaries to work under this emulator.

Box64 has now implemented support for the AVX and AVX2 instructions as well as BMI1, BMI2, ADX, FMA, F16C and RDRAND instructions. The AVX/AVX2 support depends upon ARM NEON support and the "BOX64_AVX" new environment variable can be used for controlling AVX/AVX2 and other extensions from being exposed or not.

Box64 v0.3 also adds Wayland support with Wine-Wayland code being successfully tested. Plus more libraries and functions in general are being properly wrapped by Box64. There are also various opcode fixes, returning an Intel Haswell type CPU now for what's the emulated target, and various other improvements. More games will also "just work" now thanks to BOX64_DYNAREC_STRONGMEM=1 being automatically set when encountering the Unity game engine library.

Downloads and more details on the Box64 v0.3 release via GitHub.