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?

Re:Why not use it natively?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm because apparently powerPC's are much better architecture than x86 so it's nicer to run PowerPC in emulation on x86 rather than raw x86 because then it's more like running a mac. It will also run faster if you put blue bits on your case and call it "blueberry".

Re:Why not use it natively?

[johnnliu]

Because it won't be nerd enough.

You've got to have:

Mandrake running
on PowerPC
on PearPC simulator .. throwing several flavours of linux distros
on Virtual PC
on VMWare
on XBox
on ...

To get be reported on /.

The trick then, is to withstand the /. effect on your machine.

And take a screenshot of the smoking machine.

Then you get the "Immortal" rating.

Then, just may be, you can get rooted.

Re:Why not use it natively?

[node 3]

Why not just run it natively on the x86 architecture?

You must be new here.

Re:Why not use it natively?

[jweatherley]

But, what I want to know is how well and how fast does Mac OS X run on it.

From the PearPC site:

Due to the nature of emulation, PearPC is quite slow (the client will run about 500 times slower than the host).

Not too quick then!

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?

[DiSKiLLeR]

Yes, i was getting really excited too.

But i just read the website. Its 500 times slower than the real thing :(

Oh well. Guess the previous posters are correct. Apple won't go after this project as
its next to useless. Infact, it might be a good thing. It lets people try out and play
with MacOS X before they commit to buying all that expensive hardware. (Nevermind the
legal issues of course.)

When I was first trying to make the decision to buy a mac, spending 5 minutes or 30
minutes "playing" with it at the store wasn't enough. I wanted to spend several days
on it, using it to do all the things i do now, but in a different enviornment. You
can't do that in the shop.

So i ended up borrowing a friends crappy old imac (which only ran OS9) and chucked a
priated copy of OSX 10.1 i downloaded of the net.

Loved it to bits, and promptly bought my PowerBook G4. (And then that cube of ebay ;).

So, i spose, this emulator will give people the ability to try out MacOSX and run it
to do day to day stuff, albiet very very slowly. Its a well known fact Microsoft never
went after software pirates in the old days so that their software become so
widespread it became the standard. Perhaps this might work for Apple, too.

D.

Re:Panther on x86?

[bobthemonkey13]

The "500 times slower" figure quoted was for the generic CPU emulator, too. The x86 just-in-time recompiler should be much faster, and if there's enough demand it might get ported to other host architectures (x86_64 perhaps?).

Re:Panther on x86?

[boredMDer]

In one of the screenshots, the one of Drake, there is a cat /proc/cpuinfo.

It's running at 10 MHz.

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:Panther on x86?

[dmayle]

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.

While that may be true, modern emulation techniques take this into account with things like JIT compilation. While an instruction-for-instruction emulation scheme will have performance problems, the same program compiled in C on respective platforms will run with equivalent speed. The program just needs some time to mature for speed.

Me, I plan to try and get onto the list of developers to port to x86-64. Simple emulation should be much easier thanks to the larger register file on AMD's chips...

Re:Panther on x86?

[Seahawk]

But i just read the website. Its 500 times slower than the real thing :(

When I was first trying to make the decision to buy a mac, spending 5 minutes or 30
minutes "playing" with it at the store wasn't enough. I wanted to spend several days
on it, using it to do all the things i do now, but in a different enviornment. You
can't do that in the shop.

Hmm - But you could play a total of 45 hours of "testing" in this emulator - and still havent done as much as 3½ minut on the real deal? ;)

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

[Hungus]

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

Must hurt to be wrong.

[Fuzzle]

Maybe you should actually read the webpage and see for yourself.

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

[gmaestro]

If you read the website this guy is not claiming to have a working OSX environment. He clearly states the the emulated PPC rus 500 times slower than the host. This is just a cool program in very early beta. Besides, he has screenshots of the initial stages of and OSX install, which is pretty nice for version 0.1.

screenshots

[hassr]

the project page has screen shots of os-x installing.

• http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Re:Work with OS X?

[Hungus]

A preparing installation screen is by no means proof that it is working with OS X. In fact since the emu is 1/500 th speed of the native system you can be certain it will be a while before an actual install can fully occur even without the issues of the other hardware bits.

Not the first

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

This is actually not the first PowerPC Mac emulator for x86. SheepShaver has been able to run PowerPC Mac OS (only up to Mac OS 8.6, not OS X) for some time now. It's from the developer of the excellent Basilisk II emulator.

Hopefully, the two projects will collaborate and help improve the performance of the emulator until it is usable. 1/20th of actual CPU speed would be acceptable.

Re:Not the first

[Duty]

I think it's more that emulating a CPU on another CPU with fewer registers is a less appealing prospect to the average coder then being flogged in the blistering sun for a week straight with barbed wire.

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! :)

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.

QEmu?

[pkhuong]

Does anyone know how it compares to QEmu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/)?

"QEMU is a FAST! processor emulator using dynamic translation to achieve good emulation speed. "

"News
(May 8, 2004) QEMU version 0.5.5 is out. (Changelog). Much improved Windows 98 support. VGA support in PowerPC PREP target.

(Apr 26, 2004) QEMU version 0.5.4 is out. (Changelog). This is the first version which is able to install and run Windows XP (experimental). This is also the first version which is able to boot a PowerPC PREP Linux kernel on a PC."

major bug

[austad]

From their docs: PearPC currently only supports two-button mice (i.e. middle-button click and the scrollwheel will be ignored).

They are going to have to figure out how to disable that second mouse button if they want to truly emulate OSX. :)

Re:major bug

[mrmez]

I think you're confusing Apple hardware with Apple software. OS X has supported my M$ intellimouse natively for years - although with your confusion of hardware and OS, I suppose you think the mouse somehow supports itself through Windows when used on my PowerBook... ;)

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?

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.

Performance information

[Stonent1]

Here is a screenshot of me running an OpenSSL benchmark on the emulated Macintosh:
Open SSL benchmark

And a screen shot of the PCI information:
PCI info

These tests were run on a Pentium III 500 under XP Pro. You can recrate the test on your system by running openssl speed rsa dsa md5 and compare the results to a real pc or mac running linux.

OK, so it's slow, but look how CHEAP it is.

[dpbsmith]

Apple stuff is so overpriced... why, the lowest-cost OS X platform you can buy from Apple is a $799 eMac.

With just a little bit of work and a decent motherboard you can put together a smokin' Wintel box for $400, tops and, well, sure, the eMac includes a monitor but you probably already have one.

So what if it runs at 1/200 the speed of a Mac? Hey, put a cooler on the chip and overclock it, then it will run at 1/100 the speed of the Mac!

And for less than half the price!

Well, OK, for $0.50 more than half price.

Not everyone is behind the times

[abb3w]

Mac OS X supports the use of 2nd button for pulling up "context menus", similar to right clicking in Windows. Of course, it's the same as control-clicking with the single button mouse, but it is supported. OS X also supports the scrollwheel to some extent (behaving mostly as you'd expect), which PearPC doesn't yet.

I once asked an Apple engineer why you couldn't GET a two-button mouse when buying a new Apple. It was implied that someone "with a huge amount of control over the design process" was still adamantly opposed to the 2nd button. I wonder who....

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.

How difficult would this be?

[JamesP]

I've had an idea about PPC emulation and running OS X.

What about taking a x86 "lower half" of the OS (i.e. Darwin) and plugging and emulated "upper half" (i.e. Cocoa, Charcoal, etc.) of OS X above it.

Would that be feasible?

Thanks, but no thanks

[Orion Blastar]

I run Linspire and OpenStep, easy enough for me to use and configure. No need for me to use OSX anyway.

For $450USD I can buy a very good low end PC Clone using an AMD processor at 2.0 Ghz, and an 80G hard drive, and 512M of RAM, DVD+RW drive, GeForce FX video chipset, onboard LAN, USB 2.0, Firewire, etc sans an OS and for $50USD I can buy a copy of Lindows, and use F/OSS software for the rest of it. So $500 total, and what do I have to spend to get all that with a Macintosh? $1799 for the low end G5 model. They may be worth it, but they are still out of my price range.

The iMac and eMac are underpowered for me, and not expandable enough for me.