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To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org

Blue Swirl wrote:
> BTW, we could easily design and implement an ideal CPU just for Qemu 
> purposes. It could be unlike any existing hardware, for example with 
> zero or thousands of registers. The problem would be making a compiler 
> for the CPU, also porting some OS to it. Any GCC and Linux guru 
> volunteers? CS research projects? 
This idea has been around for a long time.  When I was in school, one of 
our projects was to build a processor for such an architecture.  The 
idea has been kicked around the gnu development toolchain community for 
some time as well.

Gcc is sexy.  You shouldn't have any trouble finding a student or 
another volunteer who's interested in implementing a simple, relatively 
orthogonal instruction set.

Gas is harder.  It's not so sexy.  Nor is ld, nor gdb.

Porting linux at that point is pretty much just a matter of determining 
cpu start and load addresses.

Note: mmu management would also be a modest task, either to implement or 
to circumvent.

--rich