[Qemu-devel] Confused

[Qemu-devel] Confused

[Jamie Aczel]

Hello,

I'm attempting to sort out the discrepancies between a "WINE for PPC"  
guide posted on some mailing lists last year  
(http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-general/2004- 
June/014468.html) which makes references to the "qemu-i386" binary;

The reality, which is that none of the bundled versions of QEMU for PPC  
I've found, nor a self-compile of QEMU 0.6.1, include this binary;

and another mailing list post (URL lost, unfortunately) that explained  
that the "qemu-i386" binary is the 'fast' version of the program for  
x86 virtualization on x86 hosts, with no instruction set translation,  
and should not exist or run on PPC systems.

If that's correct, how did the writer of the first post get it to work?  
Is there any way to run Linux/x86 programs (specifically WINE) in  
recent QEMU versions without installing an entire host system? I'm  
actually using OS X, so if the platforms are too different for seamless  
emulation across them, this searching may all be useless...

Re: [Qemu-devel] Confused

[Mike Swanson]

There's a project called Darwine that uses QEMU to provide WINE on
Darwin and Mac OS X. If you don't want to use that but try it
yourself, you should look into how they do it.
-- 
Mike

Re: [Qemu-devel] Confused

[Jim C. Brown]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 10:52:11PM -0800, Jamie Aczel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm attempting to sort out the discrepancies between a "WINE for PPC"  
> guide posted on some mailing lists last year  
> (http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-general/2004- 
> June/014468.html) which makes references to the "qemu-i386" binary;
> 
> The reality, which is that none of the bundled versions of QEMU for PPC  
> I've found, nor a self-compile of QEMU 0.6.1, include this binary;
> 

qemu-i386 was still included in 0.6.0 - I haven't checked more recent versions
but I don't remember it being removed from the source.

Normally qemu is used to emulate an entire system: cpu, ram, hard disk, etc.
qemu-i386 provides translations for individual linux binaries - also
provided a translation layer so the binary could make syscalls to the native
kernel. You need to do a './configure --target-list=i386' in order to enable
it.

> and another mailing list post (URL lost, unfortunately) that explained  
> that the "qemu-i386" binary is the 'fast' version of the program for  
> x86 virtualization on x86 hosts, with no instruction set translation,  
> and should not exist or run on PPC systems.

This is wrong. The person was either thinking about qemu-fast (now defunct)
or the qemu accelerator (also known as kqemu). qemu-i386 is perfect for
running x86 binaries on PPC (such as Wine) via translation.

> 
> If that's correct, how did the writer of the first post get it to work?  
> Is there any way to run Linux/x86 programs (specifically WINE) in  
> recent QEMU versions without installing an entire host system? I'm  
> actually using OS X, so if the platforms are too different for seamless  
> emulation across them, this searching may all be useless...
> 

The catch is that qemu-i386 will only work when you are trying to run Linux
x86 binaries on a non-x86 Linux host. It works by translating between different
kernel archs. To get it to work on OSX, you'd have to do what (last I heard -
this may no longer be correct) Darwine is doing: provide a translation layer
between qemu-i386 and OSX, that converts Linux syscalls into OSX calls.

-- 
Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty.
Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.