Porting i386 Apps To StrongARM?

OneWindCat asks: "I wonder how tough it will be to port i386-targeted apps to StrongARM. I have Linux server from Rebel.com and it has StrongARM processor (low-power consuption, ~12 Wt in running mode) based architecture. I wanted to know if anyone has gone through the pain of compiling source code for such a machine and what the outcome was. Or better yet, is there an i386 emulator written for StrongARM? Performance is not an issue, since I plan to use i386 machine as an Xterminal."

Comments

Re:eh?

[bluGill]

In the real world we have to deal with thousands of lines of impropperly written code, devices (which may have a different endian), hardware memory locations that have meaning but are different.

Sure, once you have netBSD ported (or linux, for that matter windows if you have the money and time) Then any properly written porgram shoudl port easially.

Still, in the real world not everything is written in C. Sometimes programs are written in self modifing x86 machine language. When fast processors were blazing along at 8Mhz, you needed to wring all the speed you could. today you can sacrifice a little speed for easy to understand portable code, not then.

In answer to the orginial question, BOCHs is probably your best bet. SHould be portable, and emulates x86. Never has been perect, but often good enough.

Check out netwinder.org

[K-Man]

There are several newsgroups for netwinder dev issues.

I was on the mailing lists that preceded these, and the main issue I can recall was struct alignments. A lot of code expects things like

struct { char a; char b; char c; char d }

to fit into four bytes, when 4-byte alignment may push it to 16.