Qemu 0.8.0

[qx773]

A new version of QEMU v0.8.0 is out with ARM system emulation.  The web site is:

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu

I wonder if this can be used on the Zaurus models.

[Miami_Bob]

A new version of QEMU v0.8.0 is out with ARM system emulation.  The web site is:

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu

I wonder if this can be used on the Zaurus models.
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Taken From:

   [a href=\"http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/status.html]http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/status.html[/url]
==============================
Host CPU support

The host CPU is the one which executes QEMU.

Host CPU   Status
x86 ........... OK
x86_64 ...... OK
PowerPC .... OK
Alpha ......... Testing
Sparc32 ..... Testing
ARM ...=>... Testing
S390 ......... Testing
Sparc64 ..... Dev only
ia64 ........... Dev only
m68k ......... Dev only

Note: Testing means that the emulator is working on most of the regression tests, but that some important application fail.
==============================

Looks promising, IMHO.

[Da_Blitz]

From the news page it has only added support for emulating one type of arm design/board, id have to agree with the above post in that arm support is unfinished however i dont thinkk there would be any major problems

worth a try althogh keep in mind it cant emulate a zaurus yet as it would have diffrent hardware (such as ram and flash in diffrent places and sd/cf sockets

[qx773]

I am more interested in the ability of the QEMU software to emulate an IBM PC computer at near-native speeds.  QEMU is faster than an interpreter like Bochs or DOSBox, because QEMU dynamically generates code that is compiled.  If you emulate an MSDOS system on a Zaurus with QEMU, then the emulation might even be faster than an 80486 based computer running at native speeds.

[Da_Blitz]

it could be  worth a try what do you have to lose

i have used it to run arm binaries on my pc before, however the feature you want is the ability to emulate a whole system, which IS working (i386 emulation is working)

what the site says is ARM emulation isnt working, they didnt mention any problem compiling the code for running on ARM processors so you should be in the clear

now you have tempted me, i might give it a try as well

[kopsis]

If you emulate an MSDOS system on a Zaurus with QEMU, then the emulation might even be faster than an 80486 based computer running at native speeds.
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Don't get your hopes up. QEMU doing cross processor emulation (anything other than x86 on x86) is brutally slow. I see at least a 15X performance penalty using QEMU on a PowerPC to emulate an x86. That means on my 2GHz G5 I can effectively emulate a 133MHz Pentium.

Given that the Xscale is far less powerful than a G5 in terms of cache, pipelining, etc., and that the Zaurus memory architecture is designed for power efficiency over speed, you'd be lucky to get performance much beyond a 16MHz 386.

[Da_Blitz]

wouldnt that be about right for an msdos system at the time when it was used on such hardware?

[kopsis]

wouldnt that be about right for an msdos system at the time when it was used on such hardware?
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I suppose it depends on what programs one wants to run. Would probably be sufficient for something like WordPerfect or Lotus 123 and even some really antique games. Just don't expect 486 performance.

That does raise the interesting question of whether old MS-DOS productivity apps for word processing and spreadsheets would be more usable on a handheld than some of the native Zaurus alternatives? Back in the days before MS Office, people got a lot of work done with WordPerfect and Lotus (probably more than they do now with all the time that's wasted WYSIWYG formatting memos and spreadsheets).