PowerPC Architecture Emulator Unleashed

Sebastian Biallas writes "We have finally released version 0.1 of our PowerPC architecture emulator: PearPC. The emulator itself is (prepared to be) architecture independent but only tested on x86s (here you go porters...). It also features a must faster just-in-time compilation unit for x86 hosts. This means that you can now run your favourite PowerPC-OS on x86: Mandrake Linux (9.1), Darwin (6 + 7) and Mac OS X (10.3)! And the best things is: it's GPL'd. But be warned: it's experimental.."

Comments

Why not use it natively?

[GregChant]

This means that you can now run your favourite PowerPC-OS on x86: Mandrake Linux (9.1),

Why not just run it natively on the x86 architecture?

Panther on x86?

[DiSKiLLeR]

OMG!

I never thought this day would finally come... a PowerPC emulator that
is stable and mature enough to actually run MacOS X on an x86!

Oh well, i've already bought 2 macs now (Titanium Powerbook G4) and a G4
Cube (which got majorly upgraded; 1.2ghz G4, GeForce3 64mb, 1.5gb ram,
etc).

But still, I wonder... will apple try to kill this project?

D.

Re:Panther on x86?

[Anonymous Coward]

They won't have to. It's going to be dog slow, to the point of uselessness, especially if you actually try to run OSX on it.

The x86 is just really poorly suited to emulate PPC, the PPC has more registers and they're all general purpose, as opposed to x86's small groups of purpose specific registers. You can try to minimize the drawbacks from this with a JITC, but it's still going to crawl compared to the real thing.

Re:Panther on x86?

[Beatbyte]

I don't see them killing the project. Its got legitimate uses (and too many to legally be shutdown).

I'm very excited though. It will be a great day when I see a dual 3ghz+ x86 machine running OS X ;-)

Re:Panther on x86?

[KingOfBLASH]

You're right, but it's a cool toy, and if development helps further research into making some kind of cross platform machine code, that can only be good, right? I would conjecture that you should be able to create a program which could create a native x86 program from a PPC based program given the time to alter it. However, I would also conjecture my conjecture would take lots and lots and lots of work, and possibly might be harder then bringing about world peace.

Re:I call total and complete bullshit on OSX...

[Hungus]

Agreed there is far more integration of hardware than just the processor.

Whoa. This is huge.

[Anonymous Coward]

On the warez scene, now Linux masses can pirate Apple software. Apple has too much invested in their partnership with IBM to produce power4 chips for G5's and beyond to ever port OSX to x86, but if GPL'd code fixes this problem, it could start to get interesting. Imagine this thing optimized for the opteron: our long-awaited dream of high-end OSX software on cheapo hardware might finally be just around the corner.

Re:Work with OS X?

[DiSKiLLeR]

No, it does not gaurantee a working OSX installation.

But the fact that the darwin kernel boots, and Aqua can start up (no quartz extreme in the installer i am guessing) and the installer runs, he's doing _very_ well.

Infact, if he concentrates on just getting darwin working reliably (he said theres a few quirks) you can bet that OSX will run just as reliably. Its just the Aqua GUI (and carbon, cocao, apps, and all that other crap) running on Darwin. Darwin is the OS though, and as long as Darwin runs, and runs well, OSX should be a no brainer.

Getting some good hardware support in OSX for video, sound, and what not might be another story tho.

Some speed would also be nice. OSX isn't gonna run if it takes 3 weeks to install on a 10mhz emulated PowerPC chip ;)

D.

Why not run Darwin native and emulate apps

[tigersha]

A modern computer spends most of its time in system calls (Ok, depends on the program, but generally this is true). So Darwin runs on x86.

Would it be possible to get this thing to run on Darwin in such a way that the system calls run natively but the apps run in the emulator?

So only the non-kernel pats of a program are emulated? That might bring down that 500x a bit.

It would involve having some translation at the boundary between the apps and the kernel but is this not the way Apple emulated old 68000 programs when they did their transition to PowerPC?

Re:Not the first

[chromaphobic]

Something like this would only be useful for someone who wants to experiment.

It could be fairly useful for web developers/designers in Windows-only shops who want to be able to test out Safari compatability for their site. It wouldn't have to be fast just to check that their markup renders correctly on a Mac.

Still, it would have to be at least a bit faster than 1/500th the host system, it would probably take OS X an hour just to boot at that rate! :)

Neat and all, but useful?

[nine-times]

I'm seeing a lot of people saying "Great, now I can run OSX on my cheap x86 processor!" Yeah? Any idea how fast your x86 processor would need to be to actually have OSX be remotely usable? To build that little supercomputer won't be "cheap". But further, why bother? If you want a Mac, buy it. They're good. They're worth it. You'll be happy. But if you're looking for the hard way of doing things, you don't really want OSX anyway.

Re:Didn't AM64 have more general purpose registers

[cubic6]

Right in principle, but the PPC still has *way* more registers than any Athlon64. The x86-64 architecture has something like 8 general purpose registers as opposed to x86's 3 or 4. PPC has 32, as is common among RISC architectures like Sparc and MIPS. More registers also means more code to save and restore them on context switches, but the good CPUs have register windows and such to speed that up.

Bottom line is that the number of registers makes it more difficult than it would seem.

Disclaimer: I don't have the specs in front of me, so my numbers may be a bit off. Feel free to check them yourself if you think I may be very far off.