Re: [Qemu-devel] Missing ARMv6 instructions?

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

> I could understand a claim if someone acquired ARM's documentation
> under an agreement to not produce an emulator.  

That's exactly where the restriction comes from.

Theoretically it may be possible to reverse engineer a good proportion of 
ARMv6 from other sources (eg. gcc). However if that were done it would mean 
anyone with access to the real ARM documentation (i.e. me and probably anyone 
else with any professional/commercial interest in ARM emulation) would be 
unable to contribute to qemu.

> And if there is a possibility of that - in which countries do they
> have any weight?  Dare I suggest encouraging the development of
> patches they don't like to countries where they have no legal weight?

I don't think that's particularly helpful or practical suggestion.
Better would be to lobby ARM to allow open source emulators. 
"I'd like to use ARM hardware for <big project>, but qemu doesn't support 
ARMv7 so I'm thinking of using PowerPC instead" is a particularly good 
argument ;-)

Paul