Ryan Houdek
40a29ca9a7
This saves a whole bunch of memory. Cutting `Just Cause 2`'s title
screen from 1132MB anonymous FEX memory down to 438MB. 629MB in L2
alone.
L2 is primarily a means to reduce overhead in map queries, so it's all
about performance. But because it consumes a lot of people it's kind of
hard.
One idea is that the L2 lookups can be moved to shared data structures,
since we already pull the shared lock when doing an L2 lookup this is
already halfway there.
Side note, we're using unique locks even with read-only code paths
which we can't use the shared lock because this terrible recursive
mutex!
Instead of outright changing L2 behaviour and potentially wrecking
havoc, add a config option for now so testing can happen over time.
before:
```
Total FEX Anon memory resident: 1132 mB
JIT resident: 60 mB
OpDispatcher resident: 97 mB
Frontend resident: 37 mB
CPUBackend resident: 500 kB
Lookup cache resident: 629 mB
Lookup L1 cache resident: 108 mB
ThreadStates resident: 436 kB
```
after:
```
Total FEX Anon memory resident: 438 mB
JIT resident: 62 mB
OpDispatcher resident: 56 mB
Frontend resident: 22 mB
CPUBackend resident: 496 kB
Lookup cache resident: 0 (null)
Lookup L1 cache resident: 109 mB
ThreadStates resident: 436 kB
```
FEX: Emulate x86 Programs on ARM64
FEX allows you to run x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices, similar to qemu-user and box64. It offers broad compatibility with both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, and it can be used alongside Wine/Proton to play Windows games.
It supports forwarding API calls to host system libraries like OpenGL or Vulkan to reduce emulation overhead. An experimental code cache helps minimize in-game stuttering as much as possible. Furthermore, a per-app configuration system allows tweaking performance per game, e.g. by skipping costly memory model emulation. We also provide a user-friendly FEXConfig GUI to explore and change these settings.
Prerequisites
FEX requires ARMv8.0+ hardware. It has been tested with the following Linux distributions, though others are likely to work as well:
- Arch Linux
- Fedora Linux
- openSUSE
- Ubuntu 22.04/24.04/24.10/25.04
An x86-64 RootFS is required and can be downloaded using our FEXRootFSFetcher tool for many distributions.
For other distributions you will need to generate your own RootFS (our wiki page might help).
Quick Start
For Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 24.10 and 25.04
Execute the following command in the terminal to install FEX through a PPA.
curl --silent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/main/Scripts/InstallFEX.py | python3
This command will walk you through installing FEX through a PPA, and downloading a RootFS for use with FEX.
For other Distributions
Follow the guide on the official FEX-Emu Wiki here.
Navigating the Source
See the Source Outline for more information.