• stingpie@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yes. Any turing complete processor can perfectly emulate any other turing complete processor, whether it is x86, arm, or riscv. Mainline Linux can then run on this emulated processor without modification.

      • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        11 months ago

        Damn that’s gonna be slow.

        But I guess speed was not a criterion.

        • stingpie@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          11 months ago

          Emulated processors can do the same things as physical processors, including booting from disk.

          • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            11 months ago

            Boot = Bootstrap

            If you’ve loaded up a virtual CPU first that’s not a boot of mainline Linux on the CPU.

          • monk@lemmy.unboiled.info
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            Yes, but it doesn’t count, because the SoC from the picture didn’t boot Linux, an emulated machine did.

            That’s why the records on doing this silly stuff on progressively smaller microcontroller use the word “run”. It has more transitivity.

            • stingpie@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              11 months ago

              I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that the emulated processor executes instructions while the SoC doesn’t? Every instruction that goes to the x86 is broken down into several SoC instructions, which the SoC executes in order to emulate what an x86 would do. Saying that the emulated x86 is booting/running Linux, but the SoC is not is like saying that computers can’t run java code, they can only run jvm.

              • monk@lemmy.unboiled.info
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                11 months ago

                I’m saying it runs it because “running” is transitive, but doesn’t boot it because “booting” is not. Similarly to how you can carry your grandkid by carrying your kid who carries their kid (carrying is transitive), but you can’t give birth to your grandkid by giving birth to your kid who’d give birth to their kid (giving birth is not transitive).