Hello friends!

I have stumbled upon a new problem nowadays:
Let's say that you have a specific CPU from 2012 that lacks the specific AVX instruction set that a new program requires to run,

Your options:

Find another program
Buy a new CPU
Recompile the program if you have the source
Emulate the missing instruction, using for example: INTEL SDE
Cry in the corner

This is what a lot of old software would do when the FPU was absent.

Catch illegal instruction exceptions, emulate them, continue execution.

It isn't hard, but it is tedious to get it all working correctly and seamlessly.

Hey revolution!

Yeah, And it would be very cool if the kernel could do this automatically, for missing instructions if required.

I would also like to show a very cool opensource project related:
The Open-source PlayStation 3 Emulator

It has evolved over the recent years significantly.

Which kernel, which OS, is this intended for? I don't know of any existing kernel of any OS that will do this.

The most likely existing solution is a library that can be linked to. Maybe Linux has a library that can be injected with LD_PRELOAD? But that would require that the code uses the "standard" C interpreter and libraries.

I was thinking about linux.

But right now it should be possible to start a cmd.exe or terminal using sde (as root) that will "emulate" instruction sets for the programs started within.

And decompile/recompile type emulation should be very fast, especially if it only replaces less than 1% of the program code, AVX for example with compatible instructions...

Emulation code doesn't need to be root. An emulator program could start the target as a child process and "debug" it to catch illegal instruction exceptions.