RE: [Xen-devel] X86_emulate to be moved into qemu...

["Petersson, Mats" <Mats.Petersson@xxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Smirl [mailto:jonsmirl@xxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 17 May 2006 21:46
> To: Petersson, Mats
> Cc: Keir Fraser; Xen devel list; Benjamin Herrenschmidt
> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] X86_emulate to be moved into qemu...
> 
> On 5/17/06, Petersson, Mats <Mats.Petersson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Hmmm... wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have a bespoke, buggy & 
> > > incomplete emulator for hvm mmio. ;-)
> >
> > In the process of solving this one, I've got to (another) of the 
> > blocking points...
> 
> If Xen is going to need an x86 emulator, there is also need of a small
> x86 emulator based on klibc as part of the general Linux kernel.
> People often put video cards with x86 ROMs into PPC/Itanium 
> machines since the x86 versions are half the price. The 
> general idea is that during the boot process the emulator 
> would run the x86 ROM and initialize these cards. The same 
> code would be used to initialize secondary cards on all 
> architectures. After klibc gets added to the kernel tree I'd 
> also like to see the emulator and video reset program added.

Ehm, yes, but this is a much smaller emulator, as it's only emulating
instructions that are caught by page faults - so only instructions that
are doing memory accesses. 

I think you could use the full x86-emulator that is part of the QEMU
project to achive what you're after, but the x86_emualte_memop() that
we're talking about here would not be even close to sufficient for
running the BIOS on a non-x86 processor. 

--
Mats
> 
> --
> Jon Smirl
> jonsmirl@xxxxxxxxx
> 
> 


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