darwin-libplatform VS box64

Apple Open Source Resources

Apple does plenty of open source stuff. Safari's browser engine, Swift, libdispatch, the XNU kernel used by iOS and macOS, etc. And macOS is generally packed with open source things, like the default shell, zsh. Also, Metal actually predates Vulkan, so Vulkan was definitely not established when they started focusing on Metal. Yeah, they probably should consider supporting Vulkan now, but it's nothing to do with open source. The main beneficiaries of Apple supporting Vulkan would be people porting closed-source games.

It's still not a great thing to do. Apple used to contribute a lot more, even if some of their stuff was exclusive to their platform. https://opensource.apple.com

There's quite a bit of macOS that's open source. The author links to source code in Firefox, and that source code has links to Apple's source code:

> // For information about the following undocumented flags and functions see

> // https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/main/bsd/sys/ulock.... and

> // https://github.com/apple/darwin-libplatform/blob/main/privat...

Yes, but it's not so uncommon for "spinlocks" to evolve into not-actually-spinlocks. In the Linux kernel, spinlock_t is actually a mutex if PREEMPT_RT is enabled [1]. And Darwin has some code to do this in userspace [2], although I'm not sure if it's actually used.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/locking/locktypes.htm...

[2] https://github.com/apple/darwin-libplatform/blob/main/src/os...

In the video, they mentioned they can't run steam on RISC-V because box64 doesn't support 32bit apps. In the README of box64, it is mentioned:

I see it can do more now, already tried some stuff. But see it is now more mature than months ago. Will try factorio again https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/issues/665

Also, in the discussions of box64 is this thread: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/discussions/524 My guess is that you have to install both box64 and box86, the latest mesa drivers with vulkan support. And then try to launch the game with proton. There is also this issue that shows factorio running on a Rock 5B: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86-compatibility-list/issues/284

In Box64, which is an emulator+JIT recompiler, and thus likely pretty slow?

macOS runs x64 executables just fine through Rosetta so I don't see why Wine couldn't make use of that hardware acceleration.

It's also possible to only simulate the entrypoints through Rosetta and then execute native aarch64 code from there. On Linux https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64 does exactly that, for example. However, with the performance Apple has been able to squeeze out of Rosetta, I'm not sure of that workaround is even necessary.

Recently, I got a server from Oracle Cloud, having 4 cores and 24GB of RAM. Then, using a software called Box86 and its 64 bit version called Box64, I succeeded in running Factorio! Unfortunately, 1.1.80 ran at 3 UPS! I went through each major version, testing each individual one down to 0.12. Here are my results!

You could try https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 and https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/ , I believe they allow you to emulate x86_64 on aarch64, though I have no experience with them, so cannot say for sure.

git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64.git

If you have time and patience take a look at box86 and box64. These are basically like translation layers that allow x86/x86_64 applications to run on ARM. I personally haven't use them yet, so I can't provide a guide or vouch for game compatibilities. But by the look of the progress made by them so far it looks promising.

You can follow progress of this on https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/issues/635