On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 11:39:27PM +0100, Falk Hueffner wrote:
Joerg Hoh <joerg@devone.org> writes:
I want to run some virtual machines on my alpha to play around with with
different distributions, kernel and such stuff. But noone of the popular
emulators does imho work on linux/alpha (no emulation of the i386
instruction set like booch does).
qemu mostly works, except it tends to crash on larger programs. Maybe
it is easy to fix. Or maybe not; the pages being larger is a major
obstacle. Adding Alpha emulation should be pretty straight-forward...
at least for emulating userspace.
I want also run a kernel in userspace, as in uml (testing some more or less
obscure kernel patches).
So I asked on the uml-devel-list (user mode linux) how hard it is to
port the uml patch to other plattforms than i386, because this
approach seems to me to be the fastest (in terms of execution speed)
and most generic one. The answers were spare, and I've extracted
from the answers, that the most problems are the plattform specific
ones :-|
It should be easier than for other platforms, since all interaction
with the MMU and similar things (timers etc) is done via firmware
calls. So all you need to do is implement the firmware interface,
which is pretty high-level and well documented.
Hm, I will see what I can do next year. But I cannot do that all by myself,
since I haven't a deeper knowledge of the linux kernel.
See
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/alphaCPUdocs/alpha_arch_ref.pdf.gz
Thanks, I'll take a look into them.
Jörg