Normally, the Raspberry Pi or RBPi does not allow running Intel x86 applications. This is because the RBPi is ARM-based. That means it has a different architecture from the Intel-based PCs we are used to using. This is as if a letter addressed to a Russian town landing up in Denmark – the address is all wrong, so it is tough to deliver.
Virtual machines are available that create a local environment for running applications where the basic architecture differs. For the x86 platform, the most popular virtual machine software are VMware and VirtualBox. With virtual machines, you may be running Linux as your main operating system, but you can also run a full-fledged Windows operating system simultaneously and vice versa. The main operating system is termed the Host, while the OS running under the virtual machine is termed the Guest.
Eltech has produced such a virtual machine for RBPi that have ARM platforms as their base. This is the ExaGear Desktop and it allows you to run Intel x86 applications directly on your RBPi through a virtual x86 Linux container on ARM. For example, on the ExaGear Desktop, if you install Wine, the open source compatibility layer software application will allow you to run even Windows applications on your RBPi.
You can run the ExaGear Desktop on most ARM-based Mini PCs operating with Linux such as the RBPi, Banana Pi, Wandboard, Jetson TK1, Utilite, CuBox, CubieBoard, ODROID including the ARM-based Chromebook. Unlike Linux, ExaGear Desktop is not free and you can download it only after paying for its license key. However, before buying, it is prudent to check up if your Mini PC has the proper hardware and software base to allow ExaGear Desktop to run on it.
If you are using the RBPi ver1, you will need the ARMv6 instruction set with VFP32. For other RBPi versions and ARM devices, you will require the ARMv7 instruction set with VFP32. If you are planning to use x86 applications that require MMX/SSE, you will also need NEON as support. On the software side, you must be using the Linux operating system variants such as Raspbian, Debian 7, Ubuntu 14.04 or Ubuntu 12.04. Check with the Eltechs Tech Forum if you still harbor doubts about system requirements.
Eltech has published some test results to demonstrate the speed with which the ExaGear Desktop works. For benchmarking, they have used SysBench, which was built for ARM and Intel x86 platforms. Using the same ARM machine for both tests, they have compared the results of ARM-based tests against x86 tests running under the ExaGear Desktop. The tests cover parameters such as File IO read/write, CPU cycles, Memory usage, Threads speed and Mutex. Results show ExaGear to be superior to QEMU in almost all parameters.
Using their setup, Eltech has also compared the performance of ExaGear against the performance of QEMU, the user mode emulator. For benchmarking, they used GeoBenchmark and found that ExaGear Desktop was nearly five times as fast as QEMU was.
Eltech has also compared the ExaGear Desktop performance against QEMU using the nbench benchmark. Here too, ExaGear Desktop was able to show far superior performance compared to the performance of QEMU when both were run on the same platform.