PPC Emulator

[Samuel Rydh]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 12:41:12PM +0800, Rolf Schatzmann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I looked through the archives but could not find any info on this subject so I 
> figured I would ask this list.
> 
> A company called Transitive http://www.transitives.com claims to have a program that
> runs under Linux and "translates" ppc binaries to i386 on the fly, they even
> claim to have a free demo available.

Well, writing such a program is definitely not impossible (I've
done some tests with an I-cache driven approach and I believe one can
achieve reasonable speeds).

Of course, getting a binary to actually run also requires
endian flipping of all syscall parameters (e.g. structs). Getting
something which is 100% compatible is probably quite hard
(just consider ioctl parameters...).

The real challenge with respect to PPC emulation is the MMU
support (with maintained good performance).

> Is this just vapourware or do they really have this working?
> 
> I realise that this in itself would not be a way of running MOL on i386
> as it will require a complete PPC hardware emulator however it does make
> me wonder if the holy grail of emulating a ppc processor on an i386 is getting closer.
> 
> They also now claim to have a working "Synthetic CPU" that can appear as a
> PPC when run on an i386 box

After having looked through their website, I still haven't figured out if
this "Synthetic CPU" contains full MMU support. Transitive seems to focus
on fast execution of userspace code.

>assuming this were the case how hard would it
> be to get mol to talk to the PC hardware instead of the Mac hardware it
>expects (but using the synthetic PPC cpu)

MOL does not talk to the mac hardware... Well, the mol kernel module does
talk to PowerPC CPU but that module would obviously not be part
of a "MOL on x86".

/Samuel