Re: [Qemu-devel] Impractical ideas?

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 17:08 +0100, Robert Wittams wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Having installed Win2k and various Linuxes under qemu, I've got all excited
> at the potential of this project, and have been entertaining all kinds of
> possibly impractical ideas... 
> 
> I was wondering if anyone had thought of using Qemu + a special kernel
> module to do reverse engineering of binary or windows only drivers. 
> 
> I'm not sure if I'm missing something really obvious, but it seems like the
> following should be possible:
> 
> Run a virtual machine in qemu with, for example, the binary nvidia drivers
> on a linux system. On the host, a kernel module is configured that can
> perform any operations on the hardware that are necessary (io writes and
> dma, etc) and report interrupts to qemu. 

Someone was muttering the other day about the possibility of putting
qemu in the kernel and using it to run i386 binary-only modules in
non-i386 host kernels.

I think it's a sick idea, but I might look at it anyway. After all, it's
no worse than running the ACPI crap in an interpreter.

-- 
dwmw2