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We are porting a solution to ARM that was originally designed to run on x86/x64 Debian based systems.

So far so good however along with this solution we ship out a printer that is compatible and comes with drivers for Linux (x86 and x64), unfortunately the manufacturer does not have ARM drivers for it, nor is capable of compiling some from source code (don't know why).

I've installed the printer with CUPS and used the x86 binary. But of course, whenever I send a task to the printer, the ARM system cannot use the binary and naturally CUPS reports:

/usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertotg2460 failed

I would like to know how I can run x86 binaries on ARM v6 based systems?

The ARM operating system is Raspbian running on a Raspberry Pi B+ board and the binaries (if you want to take a look) are here.

EDIT:

I was also made aware of this proprietary solution that claims to make it possible running x86 binaries on ARM systems, but all demonstrations are for ARM v7 systems, not sure if it will work on Raspbian with a Raspberry Pi B+ board.

Fábio Antunes
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  • I don't know for sure if it will help, but QEMU makes it possible to run executables for a different architecture. I've used `qemu-arm` to run ARM binaries in X86 HW, so it should be possible to use `qemu-i386` to run x86 binaries in ARM, isn't it? – rodrigo Oct 28 '14 at 13:58
  • I do now know. Haven't used QEMU. But I will look into it. – Fábio Antunes Oct 28 '14 at 13:59

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I think this is going to require some serious work, but I had it the wrong way around initially.

Since you want to drive the printer, you're going to have to do the x86 emulation "inside" the CUPS system. It's not enough with a stand-alone x86 emulator, since those aim to give you a full x86 system with peripheral hardware and stuff. You don't need that, you just need to drive the printer.

I can imagine using some kind of x86 emulation library inside a CUPS "virtual" driver, which in turn loads the x86 binary you have and feeds it into the emulator. It would then need to expose the expected CUPS environment to the x86 code inside the emulator.

Something like Soft86 might be a good starting-point.

unwind
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  • But if the only problem happen to be to run the CUPS filter, that is a simple program that does input/output, and that might be emulated with a QEMU wrapper. A lot of _ifs_ but maybe it works. – rodrigo Oct 28 '14 at 14:07
  • @FábioAntunes D'oh, I got confused and had it the wrong way around. Fixed, thanks. – unwind Oct 28 '14 at 15:11
  • I never used QEMU before. How to I run a x86 binary through it? – Fábio Antunes Oct 28 '14 at 16:07