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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.."
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?
Maybe you should actually read the webpage and see for yourself.
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.
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.
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.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
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.
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?).
In one of the screenshots, the one of Drake, there is a cat /proc/cpuinfo.
It's running at 10 MHz.
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.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
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."
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
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.
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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?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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...
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?
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.
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.