Please consider providing an environment variable which disables box64. about box64 HOT 5 CLOSED

I'm not sure I understand: if BOX64_VERSION is set to something not 0, the program passed to box64 should be launch without box64?
How is that supposed to work? If you launch a x86_64 program, binfmt will redirect to box64, that, if BOX64_VERSION is set will redirect to launch natively, wich, with binfmt, will redirect to box64 and will loop indefently? Or am I missing something?

from box64.

No, the program should not launch at all. That's what QEMU_VERSION does as well. If QEMU_VERSION is set in the environment, then the program will not launch and qemu itself will just print its version string and exit.

Here is what qemu does if QEMU_VERSION is set:

https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/blob/master/linux-user/main.c?ref_type=heads#L419

from box64.

I'm really confused on what use case this could serve.

The is BOX64_EXIT that just exit box64 that is define. It's only on rcfile for now but could be extended to command line too I guess

from box64.

Yes, if I could set BOX64_EXIT=1 as an environment variable, that would solve this issue as well.

I described the use-case in my initial message. Let me rephrase:

1. I have a tool like arch-test which is supposed to tell me whether architecture X can be executed or not. The tool allows me to disable binfmt misc support in user-space for known emulators like qemu or wine using environment variables. It doesn't support box64 yet, because it does not yet have such an environment variable as qemu and wine have. If box64 would gain such an environment variable, then arch-test could gain support for box64 as well. Currently, when having box64 installed, the output of arch-test -n ${arch} is incorrect because arch-test cannot disable box64.
2. I have a tool which knows that if box64 is the one doing the x86_64 emulation, it will break (for example because it runs the foreign architecture binaries inside a chroot where box64 is not available and box64 is not compiled statically). That tool would like to be able to give the user a descriptive error message about the fact that right now, x86_64 is emulated box64 and that cannot work. Currently, it cannot find out whether box64 is the binfmt_misc provider.

I can propose a pull request that implements BOX64_VERSION equivalent to what QEMU_VERSION does for qemu if you like.

from box64.

You can submit a PR yes.

from box64.