alt Hacker NewsIs this not how qemu works? Is rosetta not considered an emulation layer? For all its name suggests otherwise, I would certainly refer to wine as an emulator, and it also uses these techniques.
Is this not how qemu works? Is rosetta not considered an emulation layer? For all its name suggests otherwise, I would certainly refer to wine as an emulator, and it also uses these techniques.
Not to be That Guy, but WINE doesn't use those techniques, and thus isn't an emulator.
It lightly translates binary formats (Windows executables) into Linux-compatible executable code, and then runs that code against libraries that implement Windows APIs in terms of Linux underneath. It's not an emulator in the same way that your libc isn't emulating lockf(3) in terms of fcntl(2) underneath. In web-dev parlance, we'd call WINE a polyfill.
Rosetta and QEMU on the other hand are emulators--emulators, in this instance, being a term of art that implies interpreting bespoke meaning from machine code instructions written in another program. Some emulators translate instructions 1:1, some have optimized stencils, some (like Rosetta) have kernel support for emulating very quickly, and some (maybe like Rosetta; sources disagree) also have hardware support as well.