Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU and its possibilities

[Fabrice Bellard <fabrice.bellard@free.fr>]

Hi,

It should be possible to port 'vl', the QEMU PC system emulator to Mac 
OS X without much problems (ELF binutils/gcc must be used to compile 
parts of it). I hope vl will soon be able to launch commercial OSes.

About the user mode emulator, it is more difficult as it needs to do a 
Linux emulation too. It may be worthwhile to use the new BSD/Darwin PPC 
Linux emulator.

Of course, integrating QEMU in wine would be the most efficient 
solution, but it requires far more work as there must be endianness 
conversion stubs for all the windows API.

Fabrice.

Josiah Walker wrote:
> Hey guys, I've been following the development of QEMU for a little while 
> now and I think the project has great potential.  Computing speed is 
> increasing so fast now that it may be possible for emulation through 
> QEMU to achieve performance that seems as good as native systems.  I'm 
> hoping this project will see the beginning of more platform independance 
> through emulation.
> 
> One important question I'd like to ask regards the portability of QEMU.  
> It is already ported to several important systems, but one OS that it 
> could have a huge impact on is Apple's os X.  It is BSD based and so all 
> the basic Linux ideas should work - and if I had the understanding of 
> the system I would try to port it myself.  Unfortunately I don't.
> 
> If QEMU were ported to Apple machines then it would open up a whole new 
> range of possibilities for Apple users wanting to run windows programs - 
> wine could be run through emulation and many useful programs could be 
> used.  I say this mainly because my Apple computer doesn't support any 
> Linux systems at the moment (a strange way to put it, but there's 
> something in the hardware/firmware that won't allow linux to boot - I've 
> tried several systems).
> 
> Another interesting port to look at in relation to QEMU is Darwine ( 
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwine/ ).  The group is porting Wine 
> to Mac OS, and in the future they will be looking for a fast x86 
> emulator to integrate into their native wine libraries.  They are 
> currently considering QEMU as a likely candidate from what I've heard.
> 
> Anyway, I was just wondering what your thoughts were on expanding to 
> other operating systems such as Mac OS, because I love the ideas behind 
> this emulator and I'd like to try it out, but I can't with my current 
> system.  Keep up the good work, if you guys can't port it to Mac OS, 
> then I'm sure another avid fan will.