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Thinstation / thinstation

A framework for making thin and light Linux based images for x86 based machines and thinclients.
https://www.thinstation.net/
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Emulation of processor instructions #821

Open Aleksa2022 opened 2 months ago

Aleksa2022 commented 2 months ago

We have quite a few computers on older processors - not yet supporting SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX. Horizon Clients 8.3+ do not work without these instructions. Is it possible to activate or enable emulation of these instructions in thinstation? I found information that it can be done this way: enable_avx_emulation=true enable_sse41_emulation=true enable_sse42_emulation=true

But I have doubts that it will work. Maybe someone has done something like this before and can suggest something useful.

Doncuppjr commented 2 months ago

While it might be possible to include an opcode emulator, it would be tragically slow. Are you sure that you want to do this?

Aleksa2022 commented 2 months ago

The thing is, I have ancient computers. Horizon Client 8.12 runs on some of them, but not on others. We tried to start in different variants, build with different parameters - it didn't help. On the thick client the same problem. We found out that 8.3 requires additional instructions AVX, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2 (maybe). I have a lot of computers that do not support these instructions - about half of all computers. It's interesting to try to emulate the missing - maybe the performance sag will be at an acceptable level. If it could be done and everyone could be switched to the 8.12 client, that would be great. We don't have thin clients in our company for intensive tasks, that's why I had an idea to check the performance loss - how fatal it will be.

Aleksa2022 commented 2 months ago

Interesting situation: on an old computer (Intel Pentium Dual-Core CPU E5700) running Linux, to run Horizon Client 8.12 has not yet succeeded in any way - tried different distributions. Meanwhile, we installed Windows 10 and everything works on it - Client 8.12 installed normally and connects to VDI normally! Under Linux we tried different distributions, tried to add different libraries that were missing and proprietary NVidia drivers - nothing helped so far. Someone managed to solve the problem by installing intel-media-va-driver-non-free

On a separate note, on computers with newer processors (core i3+) the 8.12 client installs normally in Thinstation and works fine. The problem with old processors has not been solved yet....