Yes. Any turing complete processor can perfectly emulate any other turing complete processor, whether it is x86, arm, or riscv. Mainline Linux can then run on this emulated processor without modification.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that the emulated processor executes instructions while the SoC doesn’t? Every instruction that goes to the x86 is broken down into several SoC instructions, which the SoC executes in order to emulate what an x86 would do. Saying that the emulated x86 is booting/running Linux, but the SoC is not is like saying that computers can’t run java code, they can only run jvm.
Yes. Any turing complete processor can perfectly emulate any other turing complete processor, whether it is x86, arm, or riscv. Mainline Linux can then run on this emulated processor without modification.
“boot” is the next important part. Have you tried reading it in full?
Emulated processors can do the same things as physical processors, including booting from disk.
Yes, but it doesn’t count, because the SoC from the picture didn’t boot Linux, an emulated machine did.
That’s why the records on doing this silly stuff on progressively smaller microcontroller use the word “run”. It has more transitivity.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that the emulated processor executes instructions while the SoC doesn’t? Every instruction that goes to the x86 is broken down into several SoC instructions, which the SoC executes in order to emulate what an x86 would do. Saying that the emulated x86 is booting/running Linux, but the SoC is not is like saying that computers can’t run java code, they can only run jvm.