Re: UML Port

[Joerg Hoh <joerg@devone.org>]

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

-- 
Joerg Hoh