Re: [Qemu-devel] Port to IRIX host

[Karl Magdsick <kmagnum@gmail.com>]

> 
> A question: i386-user is supposed to only run linux binaries, right? What
> are the reasons that it is disabled on Windows? Could there be a way to
> make it run on Windows, and also on IRIX?
> 

i386-user passes the Linux system calls strait through to the native
system.  You could probably get away with adding some code to
translate Linux syscalls to IRIX syscalls (with varying degrees of
glue code to emulate correct behavior) for the most common cases and
(initially) having QEMU print an error message and exit when it
reaches an unimplemented system call.  In this way, you could
gradually add support for all of the Linux syscalls.

As far as running x86 Linux binaries on x86 Win32, if you already have
a way to translate Linux syscalls to Win32 syscalls, QEMU provides
little or no advantage.  CoLinux is a project that has ported the
Linux kernel to be a WinNT subsystem so that WinNT can deal with Linux
system calls.   With CoLinux alone, you can run x86 Linux binaries on
WinNT.

Now, if you're running WinNT 3.51 on MIPS or PPC and ported CoLinux to
your system, then i386-user would be useful.  i386-user could also in
theory be used on a MIPS or PPC WinNT system to run i386 WinNT
binaries.

There is a project called DarWine that is porting Wine to Darwin (the
core of Apple's OS X).  This will allow Darwin to handle Win32 system
calls passed through by i386-user.  The specific goal of DarWine is to
allow Darwin x86 to directly run x86 Win32 programs and to allow
Darwin PPC  (including OS X) to run x86 Win32 programs when used with
QEMU i386-user.  You can find DarWine at the OpenDarwin project
(www.OpenDarwin.org).


-Karl