• stingpie@lemmy.world
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    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
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      11 months ago

      Damn that’s gonna be slow.

      But I guess speed was not a criterion.

      • stingpie@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

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

        • Ross_audio@lemmy.world
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          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
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          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
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            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
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              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).