Re: UML Port

[Falk Hueffner <falk.hueffner@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

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.

> 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. See
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/alphaCPUdocs/alpha_arch_ref.pdf.gz

-- 
	Falk