Messages

1

OpenZaurus/Opie/Qtopia / Arm And Zaurus Software Emulator

« on: June 18, 2010, 03:19:32 pm »

I had offered to Mark and his company to write the full Windows port for free, including a full debugging suite with custom ports to read/write to any value in memory.  I did not need source code access to his product, just runtime-level access with a working API.  I was willing to give him and his company the source code of my product, as well as sign over all rights to the project for any and all purposes.  He flatly refused to agree, even becoming rude to me at the end when I asked him if he realized what I was giving him.

At the time, I had told many of my co-workers about it, and they could not understand his reasoning.  There must've been some real reason why he shut it down.  I wished he hadn't, as I'm still many years later without a good emulator.

Hi Rick,

Good to hear from you again!

I'm sorry if I was rude in my email correspondence to you. I took your offer very seriously and read all of the details in all your emails. Perhaps the rudeness was in my last email in August 2005, were I said that this was my final decision. Apologies for that. I never had any interest in selling shrink-wrapped software. The end-game was to sell the IP, services and maybe the entire company. I wanted a few very large deals (maybe only one), not selling units of software at $50 a go.

In the end, there were good reasons for shutting it down and I can tell you some of the back story now. Firstly, I was the *only* person working on the software. I also had a very demanding full-time day job, so all Virtera development was done outside regular hours in my spare time. There were many late nights. The idea was to get a working product and make some big deals before quitting the day job. I never reached critical mass, never took a single dime of revenue, and never got to the point where I could make this my full-time occupation.

There were two events that finally made me throw in the towel. The first was the birth of my daughter in September 2005, literally the week after our final email. Any spare time that I had quickly disappeared! The second was that I had re-targeted the technology to be an iPod emulator. I had a near complete emulation of the 1st and 2nd generation iPods sufficient to run iPod Linux and play audio in real-time. I made some efforts to market this, but had to abandon this because of legal concerns. The final straw was when one of my target companies (the micro-processor chip supplier to Apple) lost the iPod contract and completely lost interest - they were acquired by nVidia in the end.

I thought about open sourcing the whole thing, but didn't go through with that because of the potential legal issues.

Anyway, hope things worked out for you. It sounds like QEMU is the way to go these days.

Cheers,

Mark.

2

OpenZaurus/Opie/Qtopia / Arm And Zaurus Software Emulator

« on: August 31, 2005, 10:04:59 pm »

- Clever!  Any idea when the C1k might be emulated?  (cheshire grin)
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=93988\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

We're working on the C1000 version right now, and we'll get C3000 emulation without any additional work (we already support large CompactFlash memory cards).  There's a reasonable amount of work involved, mostly PXA support plus the platform support code. We haven't decided on a release date yet, but when its reaches beta quality I'll post an announcement on oesf.org to round up some more beta testers.

Cheers,

Mark.

3

OpenZaurus/Opie/Qtopia / Arm And Zaurus Software Emulator

« on: August 13, 2005, 12:58:03 pm »

Mark,

I would be very interested in porting the emulator to the Windows/PC architecture.  As this is a commercial venture, I would be willing to sign whatever non-disclosure agreements would be required.  I would also be willing to demonstrate my abilities prior to any significant investment of time or effort on your behalf.

If interested, please contact me.

- Rick C. Hodgin
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=91674\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Hi Rick,

Can you send an e-mail to me so that we can discuss this off-line? You can reach me at support (at) virtera.com. Thanks!

Mark.

4

General Discussion / Free Demo Of Virtera's Zaurus Emulator 1.0.0!

« on: May 15, 2005, 07:35:42 pm »

PLease post when you have the full version for the 6k. This is really cool stuff, but I don't have a 5500. a virtual 6k, however.....  I'd at least find people to help buy 'em for the developers
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=79949\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

We're working on it, but it'll take a while. The first part is upgrading the micro-processor model from the obsolete StrongARM series to the PXA XScale series. The instruction set side isn't too hard (at least assuming that Thumb isn't being used),  and at first glance I thought the peripheral set was pretty similar. However, when you look into the details the memory map is completely different and every on-chip peripheral that was re-used from the SA-1100 has changes, sometimes minor but sometimes major extensions. Then there are the new peripherals (though perhaps not many of these are used) and the Sharp custom ASICs ... I'll certainly post when there's more to report on this activity, lots of people are interested in it.

Cheers,

Mark.

5

General Discussion / Free Demo Of Virtera's Zaurus Emulator 1.0.0!

« on: May 15, 2005, 06:54:11 pm »

Virtera has released version 1.0.0 of its Zaurus emulation software. You can get the demo version from http://www.virtera.com for free! The software is called VirtualMHz for ARM and the Zaurus emulation is only one part of it. In general, it's a general-purpose simulator of the ARM architecture and implements the SA-1100 as its first micro-processor and Zaurus SL-5500 as its first platform. It uses dynamic instruction translation so performance is pretty good - on a fast enough PC, you can emulate an SL-5500 in real-time!

Previous versions were available as beta tests for 30 days. The demo version is now time unlimited and fully featured. In fact the demo version only lacks some of the debug and developer mechanisms of the full product (which has not been released yet), but everything else is included. This is a proprietary product and not based on open source.  The software only runs on Linux on a PC. Sorry, no Windows version yet.

If you're interested, check it out at:

  http://www.virtera.com

Follow the link for Software Download. You need to fill in the download form to access the software. There are also various documents and the whitepaper available for download, plus a FAQ and bulletin board.

Cheers,

Mark.

6

General Discussion / Zaurus Emulator - Looking For Beta Testers!

« on: March 18, 2005, 12:50:02 pm »

But there is one for the Mac: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20152

So, an Mac mini is not a too high investment (less than a C3000). But I understand these obstacle by moving to the PowerPC processor.

-- hns
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=71282\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Thanks for the info! The reasons for supporting Windows XP are that it is a relatively straightforward port and that it gains access to a lot of end users. You are right that there won't be any Zaurus developers, but there may be people who'd like to try a C1000 or C3000 under emulation before deciding to buy one. There are also people who might want to try out a different ROM in the safety of an emulator, before they risk bricking their expensive Zaurus.

Beyond this, there are plenty of other ARM-based PDA's that are much more Windows centric ...

Mark.

7

General Discussion / Zaurus Emulator - Looking For Beta Testers!

« on: March 17, 2005, 10:43:48 pm »

Hi Andy,

Actually, the main reasons for choosing the Zaurus platform are the large amount of open-source software that can be used for testing, plus the active user/developer communities. Also, the SL-5500 is one of the cheapest and most functional ARM development platforms around ...

Mark.

8

General Discussion / Zaurus Emulator - Looking For Beta Testers!

« on: March 17, 2005, 12:40:40 pm »

Thanks for all the feedback!

kahm - it sounds like the C1000/C3000 are the way to go. I don't want to invest the effort in supporting different video chips (on discontinued hardware). The PXA LCD controller doesn't seem so different from the original SA-1100 controller. I'll probably get started with one of the other PXA-based Zaurii first to get started on the PXA2xx features (since they have better OpenZaurus and application support for testing). The wireless MMX/SSE instructions in the PXA270 should be fun to model, especially if they map nicely into x86 instructions!

dhns - I am currently working on the support for CF cards, and this will indeed be a model of the CF card controller. The actual CF memory will map onto files in the host filing system. It looks like I will be able to do the 4GB drive on the C3000 just by allowing a second CF slot with a large CF card. This should work pretty well, and it will be interesting to see if the disk i/o performance can be improved beyond CF rates.

There are no prospects for a MacOS X port unfortunately. The main problem is that the back-end of the dynamic translator is completely customized for the x86 instruction set architecture. I generate x86 instructions on the fly for performance reasons. This would need to be completely reworked for PowerPC. If the dynamic translation is turned off and the simulator falls back to instruction interpreting, performance drops by an order of magnitude to about the equivalent of a 10-20MHz ARM. This is not good enough to support real-time operation of the GUI and applications (though its fine for console use).

The other difficulty is that we don't have access to any Apple hardware nor any experience with this platform. If we are going to support another host O/S, it will be Windows XP because that expands the market enormously for us.

Cheers!

Mark.

9

General Discussion / Zaurus Emulator - Looking For Beta Testers!

« on: March 17, 2005, 03:08:04 am »

Yes, sorry for the typo's - I fixed my post.

I'm surprised that the graphics chip has changed on the C3000. Don't they use the LCD controller on the PXA270?

Mark.

10

General Discussion / Zaurus Emulator - Looking For Beta Testers!

« on: March 16, 2005, 11:28:34 pm »

Mark,

do you plan to support emulation of C-series models (like C[78]60, C3000, etc)?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=70730\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Actually, let me turn this question around.

We want to choose one new Zaurus model to support in the future. Basically, the C7x0 and C8x0 are largely the same from the simulation point of view, so we would choose the C860 out of these. The only disadvantages are that they're not readily available in the US and fairly expensive, which makes it harder for us if we ever need access to real hardware/specs for reference.

The C3000 primarily adds the hard drive. This is a significant additional piece of work which will take more time. This one is also more expensive and harder to get hold of. From a simulation point of view, you can always use NFS over a network connection to access the host's disk so there isn't as much benefit to supporting this anyway. Also there isn't an OpenZaurus for this yet.

The other alternative is the SL-6000 which has the 400MHz XScale and the 640x480 screen. From a simulator point of view this pretty much provides the same functionality as the C7x0/C8x0 series. The C-series clam-shell and improved keyboard don't matter with a simulation!

So, considering the points above which would you like to see supported out of: SL-6000, SL-C860 and SL-C3000?

And remember we're only going to do one of these to start off with.

Cheers!

Mark.

(Edited: fix SL-5600 to SL-6000)

11

General Discussion / Zaurus Emulator - Looking For Beta Testers!

« on: March 15, 2005, 04:29:50 am »

Mark,

do you plan to support emulation of C-series models (like C[78]60, C3000, etc)?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=70730\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Hi,

There's a lot of interest in supporting more recent Zaurus models and I think we will probably pick a C-series model to do next. There is a fair amount of work to do as the platform has evolved quite a lot. For example, the XScale line of CPUs (with Thumb instructions) rather than the very old StrongARM SA-series in the original Zaurus. I can't commit to any time-scale at the moment, but it is in the pipeline. Cheers,

Mark.

12

General Discussion / Zaurus Emulator - Looking For Beta Testers!

« on: March 15, 2005, 02:11:52 am »

Hi there!

I'm looking for beta testers for a new software product that emulates the Sharp Zaurus on a PC running Linux. It is able to model most of the system features of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 platform such as the memory, LCD, touch-screen and serial ports for example. It is possible to connect to a network via PPP and download OpenZaurus packages from an internet feed.

The emulator will be a commercial product, and priced appropriately for home users, and for business users. I'm currently looking for volunteers for the beta test program. Basically you get to try it out for free before the release, and we get to find about bugs or suggestions for improvements. This is a great way to try out new Zaurus distro without worrying about bricking your Zaurus in the process!

If you are interested, please check out the details over at:

    http://www.virtera.com

and become a site member if you'd like to give it a try. You will need to have access to an x86 Linux machine (many distros are supported). Sorry, Windows is not supported yet.

It can run bare machine programs, vanilla Linux kernels, and OpenZaurus SL-5500 distributions. The emulator uses some fairly sophisticated simulation techniques so performance is really good. It is close to a real-time simulation of the SL-5500 on a fairly ordinary 2.6 GHz Pentium 4, and better on an Athlon 64 3400+. It does a pretty good job running Zaurus Pacman in real-time for example!

There have been quite a lot of improvements recently:
  - bug fixes
  - support for AMD processors
  - support for more distros
  - now able to save root file system back to a file preserving state
  - performance improvements

Look forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,

Mark.

13

OpenZaurus/Opie/Qtopia / Arm And Zaurus Software Emulator

« on: January 30, 2005, 02:25:31 pm »

Hi Philipp,

Commercial means that this is proprietary software, developed as an original work by Virtera Inc. as part of a commercial enterprise.

Although we don't support gentoo at this time, there is a good chance that one of the supported distributions will just work. The main dependency is on the dynamic libraries supported by your distro. If there is a problem then I can work with you to solve it.

We haven't disclosed pricing yet, but we will set appropriate price points for home users, and for business users.

Mark.

14

OpenZaurus/Opie/Qtopia / Arm And Zaurus Software Emulator

« on: January 30, 2005, 12:31:02 pm »

Mickey - just approved your account. I was hoping that you'd register! I spent many hours debugging the boot of OpenZaurus on the emulator, and found a lot of invaluable insights from you in various forums and IRC logs!

There was one problem I remember in particular. The emulator would go into an infinite loop about 3.2 billion (yes billion) instructions into boot. This was well into init.d processing and the problem was in user space, not the kernel, making it that much harder to find out what was going on. Finally, I was able to grab all the sources, and build my own OpenZaurus distro using oemake (great stuff!) and turn on various debugging flags. It turned out that it was hanging inside some math routines used by SSH RSA key generation. I had a bug in the emulation of the ARM's 32-bit by 32-bit to 64-bit multiplies that prevented a math intensive loop from converging. After I fixed this one bug everything worked beautifully.

I think that the emulator will be really useful for kernel and distro testing. It means you can try out all kinds of new stuff without worrying about bricking your Zaurus.

I'll attach a couple of screen-shots below. These were taken using the GIMP just by grabbing the window running OpenZaurus.

Mark.

15

OpenZaurus/Opie/Qtopia / Arm And Zaurus Software Emulator

« on: January 29, 2005, 09:11:49 pm »

Hi everyone!

I've been working in stealth mode on a software emulator for the ARM architecture. It runs on a PC (Linux only at present) and emulates the system features of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 platform. Currently I am able to run bare machine programs, vanilla Linux kernels, and OpenZaurus SL-5500 distributions. The emulator uses some fairly sophisticated simulation techniques so performance is very good. I am close to a real-time simulation of the SL-5500 on a fairly ordinary 2.6 GHz Pentium 4. It does a pretty good job with Zaurus Pacman for example!

The emulator will be a commercial product, and I'm looking for volunteers for the beta test program. If you are interested, please check out the details over at http://www.virtera.com and become a site member if you'd like to give it a try. You will need to have access to an x86 Linux machine with a supported distro, and have some familiarity with installing from RPM, building Linux kernels and installing OpenZaurus to get started.

Look forward to hearing from you! Cheers,

Mark.