Universal Emulators Return

webmilhouse writes "Wired has an article about Transitive Corporation that claims their software "allows any software application binary to run on any processor/operating system" without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa, which Wired likened to digital alchemy. The Transitive software is supposed to be released today. What do you think, vaporware or miracle?"

Comments

Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[AKAImBatman]

Like many hyped up concepts, I don't think this product is really all they're making it out to be. At the same time, however, I don't think it's vapor. Instead, it's probably something in between that performs as advertised, but mitigating factors (300MHz CPU?) result in it not being everything everyone expected.

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[Nos.]

Okay, but for a product that really is this good, why is the newest news on their site dated March 2003? (There's an article in 04, but it has nothing to do with what they're releasing)

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[Atreide]

maybe because it's not vapor anymore ?
it's already evaporated !

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[Kierthos]

So if it went from glossy brochues to vaporware, would it be product sublimation?

Kierthos

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, looking at their website, I'd say the vapour is not going to hold -- otherwise they'd have their webserver emulate a way faster machine with a significantly faster Internet connection... ;-)

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[skraps]

All of you naysayers take note:
This is not vaporware! I am on the beta test team for this product. In fact, right now, I just fired up a copy of Duke Nukem Forever on OS/2. Works like a champ.

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[grantsellis]

Yes, it's not all they're making it out to be. The poster read the teaser instead of the article, not that we're surprised :)

QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor.

and

Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said Transitive benefits from the fact that most modern machines are fast enough to emulate each other without much affecting performance.

"Typically with emulation you take a big performance hit," he said. "Their big breakthrough is they are much more efficient ... but there's so much overhead anyway, you can pretty much put any software on any platform. The power user might notice the difference, but the other 95 percent won't notice."

so yes, it does affect performance. You take a 20% hit. The "almost no performance hit" means, in this context, "computers are fast enough that no one will notice unless they're doing something crazy like video editing. Go back to surfing slashdot."

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[ajs]

Yep, none of this is new tech. In fact, it's pretty old tech at this point. Emulators/translators and everything in between have been the subject of experimentation for decades.

Actually, I expect to see someone sit down and write this for Parrot sometime soon. Especially of interest would be an S/390 emulator written in Parrot.

Parrot, for those who don't know, is a VM that targets very high level languages, but it's flexible enough and has a sufficiently strong JIT compiler that a hardware emulator extension to Parrot could easily produce code that would perform as well as the described product.

The cool part about writing such an emulator for Parrot is that you get access to the resulting emulated code from a number of high-level languages, so you could port over your S/390 airline application written in TPF and call its routines from a Java, Perl, Scheme or Ruby program, jumping into and out of hardware emulation as you go. While high-level languages would only have gross access to data as opaque objects, the hardware emulator could provide the ported code with everything that it expects.

"Emulation" is a sophisticated art at this point, and it's going to get very interesting over the next few years.

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[Croaker]

Hmm... well, to prove their product actually works (and to confuse the hell out of Netcraft) they could host their site on IIS running under OS X.

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[Riff6809]

After reading the article, I personally see the whole issue as much ado about nothing. The quotes provided in the article leave me with the impression that those who were involved with the article had little experience with emulators or were quoted out of context. I think this is obvious given remarks like "One of the key breakthroughs is an 'intermediate representation'..." that imply revolutionary thinking when in fact the ideas are not new.

I'm sure their product does whatever they designed it to do, but the article alludes to platform migration and operating system virtualization. This screams out to me that the emulated programs are going to be very well behaved out of necessity, and most hardware interfaces will not be accessable except through API calls. Additionally, desktop PC software and operating environments tend to be much more 'regular' than embedded systems like game consoles. It is much easier to describe the behavior of user-mode code on a platform with a generic memory space and API set than it is to describe the behavior of an embedded multiprocessor system with control registers, DMA, custom graphics and audio subsystems and banked memory.

I also have to question the allegation that "no one has successfully developed an emulator for multiple processors and operating systems." Dynamic recompilation is not new. Intermediate representations are not new. Surely there exist some emulators which are capable of emitting multiple native instruction encodings in the backend. If none exist, I doubt it is because they are not capable of doing so.

Describing a processor architecture and providing an API mapping is not a trivial task by any means. The Transitive tool doesn't just 'simply work,' its requires a massive undertaking to prepare the behavior descriptions that I imagine would be in some ways more difficult than writing an ad-hoc single-platform emulator. I think that calling their tool a "hardware virtualizer" is probably a good idea, but not because its faster than an "emulator," but more because its likely nowhere near as powerful as a system emulator.

Finally, I would also beware the performance claims. Dynamic recompilation is certainly the way to go for ultimate performance, but when you generalize architectures, you often lose the ability to take advantage of native features. Also related to processor capabilities, the overhead incurred by emulation is highly correlated to the disparity between the host platform and the emulated platform. Transmeta processors suffer about 20% overhead and thats using a flexible VLIW architecture designed with x86 emulation in mind and using a dynamic recompiler that supports *only* x86. Thats a huge performance penalty, even if programs are running as fast as needed. Given the generalized emulation approach, I think its clear that the feasibility of such an approach is going to depend heavily on the host platform being more powerful/flexible than the emulated platform.

FWIW, I am the author of Nuance, the Nuon emulator. Nuance currently performs all of the same feats listed in the article including block translation, optimization and 'OS' virtualization (native implementation of the Nuon BIOS). I'm currently working on emitting native code using a custom x86 run-time assembler and backpatch mechanism.

Not vapor

[BoldAC]

If it's going to be released today, I am assuming it is not vapor...

Re:Not vapor

[Davak]

Yeah, obviously! :)

QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor. It requires no user intervention: It kicks in automatically when a non-native application is launched.

It sounds like it is software that translates one machine language to another? Pretty sweet idea!

It will still have some java-ish problems with each different form of hardware needing a unique version to translate. And then updating each of those versions as each change in the operating systems occur, etc.

Davak

Re:Not vapor

[RetiredMidn]

It sounds like it is software that translates one machine language to another? Pretty sweet idea!

There was a translation solution in place back in the early 90's: Apple was working with a company called Echo Logic (probably not in existence today; please don't /. the logical URL!), a spin-off of Bell Labs, that could convert 68K binaries to PowerPC as an approach to migration to PowerPC.

I worked with them for a while to see if we could port our application (which would have required tons of work to re-compile for PowerPC); the technology was impressive, but aspects of our code gave it fits (trap patching, and dispatch tables that were effective self-modifying code).

The EL technology identified code blocks in the binary, built an intermediate representation of all the effects of each code block, and translated it back to binaries in the target architecture. Theoretically feasible, but computationally very expensive. In some test cases, the translated code was in fact more efficient from the original, because the software was able to detect unused output of a code block, and re-code the block to eliminate the unused "side-effects."

Ten+ years later, maybe somebody has more of the gnarly problems worked out. But I would bet there are issues that can't be solved with technology; i.e., the binary software on the "source" system. Presumably you can find and translate the system binaries to build a translated app, but wouldn't this constitute "reverse engineering" that most software licenses prohibit?

Remember...

[Steve G Swine]

... if nothing runs at all, everything runs equally well.

Re:Remember...

[Arker]

Show me Windows Quake 3 running on a Powerbook, now that would be something a little more impressive.

Actually, not. Emulating x86 on a PPC chip is easy.

What would be truly impressive would be running, say, Wolfenstein3d Mac on an x86 box, with reasonable speed. That would be far more difficult.

Reading the article, it sounds like a lot of hype, and I suspect the product behind it, even if it's pretty well done, will never live up to the hype.

Re:Remember...

[Erwos]

Do a Google search for PearPC. People have most certainly gotten MacOS X running on their x86 boxes.

-Erwos

Re:Remember...

[aldousd666]

that's not done by translating stuff, that's actually emulating another processor... Vitrual PC is not the same thing here. Same goes for vmware.

This product claims to translate the code block by block into native code, thusly not emulating another processor per se. Metaphysically we could say that the two are equivelent, but it's not built around the fake processor as a unit like the other popular emulators are.

Re:Remember...

[CritterNYC]

Do a Google search for PearPC. People have most certainly gotten MacOS X running on their x86 boxes.

I have. PearPC has been great for firing up Safari and Mac IE on my AMD 64 3200+ box to test websites. It's no speed demon, though. It's sluggish even on my system. The PearPC folks state that performance is roughly 1/40th that of native.

Games Games Games

[Gr8Apes]

If true - we'd have any game worth playing on Linux or Macs, and life would be good, most likely, too good to be true.... :(

Re:Games Games Games

[gl4ss]

it's not the machine code that's the trouble with playing windows games on x86 linux machines, rather the problem lies in the supporting libraries(d3d & others).

Any program?

[vistic]

Wouldn't you still need a bunch of supporting files and APIs to run a Mac program on Windows, vice versa, and for other operating systems? Programs make specific calls to the operating system, like windowing toolkits... this emulator must be huge to ensure everything works and they must have done massive successful reverse engineering of closed source files in the Windows architecture.

Re:Any program?

[little_blaine]

Well said. I can see a program that does on-the-fly translation of assembly code, but the first time you try to access a windows .dll on a mac, or a linux .so on windows (for example), or make any kind of system call on a foreign platform, you will hit problems.

Now here's an interesting thought: MacOS X on x86. Or windows on PowerPC.

Re:Any program?

[BobTheAtheist]

He just translated it to another language on the fly without most people even noticing. You must be a power user.

Re:Any program?

[Durandal64]

I really wish this RISC/CISC myth would just die. Just about every desktop processor nowadays is a RISC/CISC hybrid, including the Pentium 4 and PowerPC 970.

Re:Any program?

[Chris Burke]

Every x86 processor since the Pentium Pro (possibly the AMD K5, not sure, but regardless...) has had x86 decoders that translate the x86 CISC instructions into much simpler RISC-style micro-ops that the rest of the machine deals with. The typical case is that the decoders can directly translate simple instructions (e.g. add eax, [rsp + 10] -> a load micro-op followed by an add micro-op), and refer to a microcode ROM to get the sequence of RISC ops for more complicated instructions like FXRSTOR or INT.

In the case of the Pentium 4, the x86 decoders only operate on instruction data coming from the L2. The trace cache on the P4 caches RISCy micro-ops, which is the main benefit of the trace cache on the P4 -- skipping the relatively lengthy decode of x86 instructions.

So from a micro-architecture standpoint there is very little difference between CISC and RISC, since you just translate CISC->RISC. x86 still manages to be a big PITA because of weird things like shifts by zero which don't effect the flags.

CISC vs RISC is basically a done deal, with RISC "winning" along with it essentially not mattering anymore.

ooooooh, yawn!

[mrpuffypants]

In demonstrations to press and analysts, the company has shown a graphically demanding game -- a Linux version of Quake III -- running on an Apple PowerBook.

I'm sorry, but that's just not impressing me. Not to mention that there's already a native Mac OS 9/X port of Quake III, but it's not even the most system-dependent code that I can think of.

When I can run Office 2003 natively inside Linux then we can talk.

Re:ooooooh, yawn!

[swillden]

When I can run Office 2003 natively inside Linux then we can talk.

Define 'natively'. Because Crossover Office can run Office 2003 on Linux just fine, today.

Re:ooooooh, yawn!

[isolation]

If you can get it to install it will run but I dont know how well. At this time we dont support Office 2003 but we are working on it.

Today's Poll

[eSims]

Transitive Software:
1. Vaporware
2. Miracle
4. Coyboy Neal

Personally, I vote it's just Coyboy Neal at it again.

Like java's HotSpot?

[tunah]

They're talking about recompiling sections of critical code, like java's HotSpot. It'll be interesting to see how fast it ends up - the startup time is a pain in java, but it's pretty decent after that. I can't find a source for the "no performance hit" bit. It looks real, and quite impressive, but not exactly what the summary indicates ;-)

Taos

[mirko]

A few years ago, while I was still primarily using my Acorn ARM-based RiscPC, I remember being in contact with TAOS people, they were making an heterogeneous processor operating system on which they claimed they emulated a virtual processor on which the whole environment would run, regardless of the hardware.
So, this idea reminds me of this project...
It could still be possible, we've got Java classes instantiated and running on many architectures, after all...

Vaporware

[g0bshiTe]

Does this mean I can finally get WINE to work under Windows?

No performance hit?

[theluckyleper]

If there's no performance hit, there must not be true "emulation" going on... it would be impossible to emulate another OS and architecture without a few extra cycles!

The only way I can imagine this happening is if the software reads your executable and then does a one-time translation into a native executable. That way the native executable wouldn't be emulating anything, it would be the real deal. But... the complexity of such software would be staggering.

Here's hoping it works!

Re:no performance hit?

[AKAImBatman]

that's not possible, just translating to another set of instructions takes some of the cpu's resources

According to TFA, this is a pre-compiler/translator, not an emulator. i.e. The entire program is recompiled for another platform using only the binary data as the source. This is theoretically possible and has been attempted many times, but such compilers often trip over levels of indirection that programmers add.

For example, a programmer might place the video address in a variable, then reference that for screen paints. Such a trick would be impossible to detect at compile time, and would only be properly handled by a true emulator.

Tortoises all the way down.

[Libertarian_Geek]

Sounds like an emulator equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. I can't say if this is real or vapor for certain, but it sure sets off my BS alarm.

Re:Tortoises all the way down.

[gfxguy]

Surely you can't read into "no performance penalties" not to mean "on like hardware".

Re:Tortoises all the way down.

[TurtlesAllTheWayDown]

Er. I resen^Hmble that :/

Re:Tortoises all the way down.

[AstroDrabb]

I am sure they didn't mean it could run your application at the same speed on _slower_ hardware. Anyone with more then 3 brain cells could figure that out. Basically they are claiming on similar hardware you should not notice a speed loss.

Re:Tortoises all the way down.

[Blitzenn]

What are you trying to say? That a horse is not a horse if you look at it from the ass end? That's silly! If the code was written for a CISC processor and you run it on a RISC processor, it HAS TO take extra clock cycles to tranlate the complex instructions back to reduced instructions. It cannot happen magically and software actually takes clock cycles to run so the emulation has to provide a performance hit in itself. It's simply self delusional to accept anyones claim in this area as truthful. It is a claim that you can get more energy out than you put in. It cannot happen. You cannot make hamburger from steak without putting energy into the crank to turn the grinder. Yes it's still all beef, but it takes extra effort to change it from one packaging to the next. (Silly Goose!, or is it Silly Goose Meat!)

She wanted a reason.....

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

allows any software application binary to run on any processor/operating system

My wife said, "Give me a good reason why you need to keep those things! There's not enough room in the closet to put my shoes."

Now I can use this as an excuse to hold on to my Commodore 64 stuff.

Re:She wanted a reason.....

[savagedome]

If you start giving her good reasons to keep Commodore 64 stuff, you might have to give her a good reason to keep YOU eventually ;)

Just a thought.

Were cross-platform ports shown?

[Cus]

a Linux version of Quake III -- running on an Apple PowerBook
...and...
Windows laptop running the Gimp image editor for Linux

Funny how those applications are already available for those platforms, hmmm? I'd like to have heard about something being shown that isn't already available natively.

Re:no performance hit?

[Firehawke]

Unless it's a static or dynamic recompilation technique-- it could translate before execution, dumping a new binary which it executes. You'd have a much longer start time, obviously, but it'd run at the full speed possible. Assuming, of course, that your recompilation techniques are 100% perfect.

Doubtful, but possible.

Kinda ironic isn't it...

[arock99]

That they claim their software is fast but yet their web site is reaaaaaaaaaaly slow

Re:Kinda ironic isn't it...

[ZoolTheNinja]

Well of course it's slow! They are emulating IIS on WinNT, all running on a Commodore 64!

Great Success Story!

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the illusive nature of their product, it is especially incredible that they were able to get five of the world's largest computer OEM's on board so early.

Now you can run any software, anywhere, with no speed hit (relative to a 4.77 MHz PC XT or a C= 64 or a 512K Mac) on hardware from these everyday major name brand OEM's:

Billy-Bo's Bayou's only Computer OEM
Wang Tu Short Compuder OEM of China
DR CLEMENT OKUN NIGERIA BUSINESS COMPUTER MANUFACTURERS
San Rio Hello Kitty Laptop Division
TransitivePC & Electronics

Act now, because supplies of this software are very limited, and once this run is completed, no more can be made (because their damn drunk coders crashed a pickup truck into their RAID array)!

Did anyone note...

[cavac]

...that they seemed to run only processor-native code. Even Linux-Quake: Linux IS ported to the Mac ;-)

And the example of the XBox: Xbox is essentially a PC anyway.

This looks more like the technique the WINE project is using: Run a program on it's native hardware platform on another OS by making library- and systemcall-wrappers.

If that is indeed the case, "translating the code page-wise" can be translated to "re-linking dynamically loadable code page-wise".

Just my 2 cents

Software choices....

[kidgenius]

Turley said he watched a Windows laptop running the Gimp image editor for Linux.

In demonstrations to press and analysts, the company has shown a graphically demanding game -- a Linux version of Quake III -- running on an Apple PowerBook

Does this company realize that proper existing ports of each of those particular pieces of software exist in some kind of native form for those architectures? I've used GIMP in Windows w/ no problems. Also, as mentioned previosuly, Quake III already exists for the Mac as well. What good are they doing by using software that already exists in ports? I want to see a copy of some DirectX game running on a Mac/Linux w/o a performance hit. This company so far has not proven anything by using the two comparisons cited in the article.

Fine print

[archeopterix]

It runs everything (1) on everything (2) without performance hit (3).

(1) Uhm, err, the current version only runs Pacman, which required some modifications to the binary
(2) only on Windows XP, but we're working on the Win 98 version.
(3) The technology used allows for theoretical performance equal or even exceeding the native hardware. This will work in next version, "FlyingPig 6.0".

Re:It runs on magic

[no reason to be here]

sounds like this was written in some new programming language, perhaps one based on Magic.

So how much mana would I need tapped to run Photoshop in Linux?

On their "technology overview" page...

[Kippesoep]

there is mention only of unices. Operating System Mapper. Dynamite supports operating system mapping between any two Unix/Linux-like operating systems, as well as mapping between mainframe and any Unix/Linux-like operating systems. Don't see "Windows" mentioned in there. I assume it would be a lot easier to run a Linux version of Quake 3 on BSD-based Mac OS X than to convert stuff to/from a rather more different OS such as Windows.

Had me until "no performance hit"

[visionsofmcskill]

Bottom line, a porcessor essentialy comes down to several basic comparisons and read/write add/subtract operations.

so it is technicaly feasible that if you map out a fair amount of the pipelines of most of the popular chip sets, you could technicaly have a command chain to allow binaries the same calls through a sudo-emulation layer of the software.

fundamentaly possible, and even do-able.... but without a performance hit? no way. Each processor is geared towards a particular way of solving a physcial and mathmatical set of problems... some processors are designed for massive loads of database driven calculations (XEONs)... some for multimedia (G5)... some for science (PPC, Sparc?)... some for power savings (ARM)....

depedning on which archetecture your using, the performance will be greatly hindered if your trying to do something designed for a radicaly different chip. Such as trying to run some expansive G5 optimizied photoshop plug on a ARM chip.

"no performance hit" = total bullshit

Clearly vaporware

[hopethishelps]

without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa,... What do you think, vaporware or miracle?

This is vaporware. What they're claiming - "without any performance hit" - is impossible. Accomplishing the rest of what they claim is not impossible, but it's very difficult, and since the "without any performance hit" claim establishes conclusively that these people are bullshitters, I don't believe they can even come close to doing it.

Legal status (pretty OT)

[Maffy]

Does anyone what the legal status of running this operation over commercial software would be?

The reason you need a licence to use software is because your CPU makes a copy of the program (in RAM) and this would otherwise violate the programmer's copyright. I believe that the licensing terms are generally pretty strict, e.g. one copy, to RAM only. Therefore, I'm not sure you'd be permitted to take a copy of their program, mangle it and dump it back out to disk.

Does anyone know of any reason why this would be permitted, or how people intend to get round this problem?

I appear to have been reading too much groklaw.

not impossible, but we'll see.

[pb]

The marketing jargon goes a bit over the top, but it isn't impossible to translate code for one ISA to an intermediate form, optimize it, and then generate code for another ISA. I don't know that it's revolutionary either. Note that LLVM takes a similar approach, and has a very simple intermediate form. I hear someone on their team is working on a PPC front-end, and as for language front-ends, Java and C# is in the works.

Getting back to Transitives, in July 2001, they claimed to already be doing x86->MIPS translation, which bodes well for x86->PPC. However, doing things efficiently the other way around is tougher. And of course you need to support or translate a ton of the native OS API calls etc. It'll be interesting to see for Windows on Linux (for example) if they require a copy of Windows to run the binaries.

Now this is funny...

[illumina us]

In demonstrations to press and analysts, the company has shown a graphically demanding game -- a Linux version of Quake III -- running on an Apple PowerBook.

Because the past 2 generations of PowerBooks haven't been running on a BSD kernel which is very similar to *nix and runs most *nix applications natively anyway? Moreover, Quake III uses OpenGL as a renderer which makes ports a lot easier than games using DirectX.

slashdotted - vaporized

[tsager]

See, the domain already vanished...

I bet that webserver was emulated. No perfomance loss..ha!

I saw a beta test!

[Atryn]

Confirmed! I saw a beta test of this product. It was used during the filming of Independence Day. They successfully used the program to upload and execute a virus from a Mac to a never-before-seen Alien computer system. It was even able to display graphics without having prior experience with the displays in question!

Article is vapor-news

[Anonymous Coward]

Since TFA is a worthless content-devoid POS, and since the transitive website is /.ed, here is a useful link on HOW they claim to do it. It sounds plausible, at least. http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:KjTa-qAM7LQJ:ww w.transitive.com/technology.htm+site:www.transitiv e.com+-qwerty&hl=en

Answer from Transitive's Website

[mofochickamo]

Transitive explains the architechure of their system here. Basically, to support APIs on different operating systems they have what is called an Operating System Mapper. They don't claim that it maps Mac to Windows or Linux to Windows. Basically, it maps two like systems together (like Solaris to AIX or HPUX to Linux). If there is no straightforward mapping then the customer defines the map.

After reading this, the term Universal Emulator doesn't seem to apply. Here is the text from Transitive's Website:

Operating System Mapper. Dynamite supports operating system mapping between any two Unix/Linux-like operating systems, as well as mapping between mainframe and any Unix/Linux-like operating systems. Where similar operating system calls exist between the source and destination operating system, Dynamite maps calls between the two. Where an equivalent operating system call doesn't exist in the target environment, Dynamite maps to similar calls per the customer's guidance. Dynamite also monitors certain system calls, for example thread scheduling and memory mapping calls, to ensure that it can reproduce the complete behaviour of the program it is executing.

Re:OT: where is that from?

[Matthaeus]

From the forward to Hawking's "A Brief History of Time."

Re:No performance hit?

[photon317]

Actually, I could conceive a brilliant software engineer coming up with a universal translation mechanism that turns x86 assembler into functionally equivalent PowerPC assembler, or vice-versa, or to other platforms. I believe IBM had been funding research in thsi area for quite some years now.

What sets off the BS detector for me is the APIs. They consistently state that they can do this for any OS. You have to do API translation, and you'd have to do that per OS, and it's a staggering volume of work to get all the APIs translated (think Wine project, just trying to do windows->linux api on a single shared hardware platform). When my linux binary calls any given kernel, C library, or even other common library (readline?, pthreads?, opengl?, etc..), those calls all have to be translated to equivalent MacOS or Windows API calls.

Enderle? Media Whore.

[sparkhead]

"Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said Transitive benefits from the fact that most modern machines are fast enough to emulate each other without much affecting performance."

All I needed to know. This guy will say anything and if he appears in your press release (yeah, it's an "article" but certainly the material is in a press release), chances are you're straining for credible commentary.

Complete Text of Transitive's Architecure

[mofochickamo]

Dynamite allows software that has been compiled for one processor/operating system to be run on another processor/operating system without any source code or binary changes. To do this, Dynamite provides a hardware virtualization technology that consists of four key components. First, an integration FUSE allows Dynamite to be easily integrated into the target system. Second, a dynamic binary translator tackles the challenge of moving from one instruction set architecture to another. Third, an operating system mapper translates operating system calls from the source system to the target system in situations where the source and target operating systems are different. Finally, a graphics subsystem mapper translates graphics system calls from the source to the target system in situations where the source and target graphics systems are different.

Integration FUSE. Dynamite is integrated with the operating system of the target system and runs like any other application. Unlike static translators that translate an applications binary once before run time, Dynamite translates instructions and operating system calls while an application is running. When a foreign application is started, the operating system recognizes that the application needs translation and automatically starts Dynamite. Depending on the requirements for the integration, Dynamite can be configured with a wide range of options, including the ability to build bridges between translated code and code running native on the target platform. This feature has been used, for example, to allow translated applications to call a native accelerated graphics library for the graphics chipset in the target platform, delivering higher quality and speed than other solutions. Integration options also provide for different optimization schedules and the ability to reconfigure the use of the translation code cache to better match performance to customer needs.

Dynamic Binary Translation. The dynamic binary translator in Dynamite is a breakthrough technology that uses a modular architecture consisting of three key components. The front-end decoder reads blocks of instructions from the foreign applications binary and decodes them into an intermediate representation. The intermediate representation allows Dynamite to understand the higher-level semantics and intent of the code.

The optimizing kernel reads the intermediate representation and optimizes the code. At first, simple optimizations are performed. In most applications, however, a 90/10 rules holds where 10% of the code is executed 90% of the time. The optimizing kernel looks for blocks of code that are executed often, spends increasing amounts of time improving the optimization of this code, and then stores this optimized code in memory. Each time a frequently used block of code needs to be executed, the highly optimized code stored in memory is used instead of optimizing that block of code again. Because the blocks of code that are executed change frequently, the optimizing kernel flushes old optimized blocks and generates new ones. The optimizing kernel produces superior code optimization compared to static binary translators or compilers. It optimizes code based on how an individual user is using that application and does not need to optimize code for the general case.

The back-end code generator outputs code for the target processor

Um...

[Theaetetus]

Does this company realize that proper existing ports of each of those particular pieces of software exist in some kind of native form for those architectures? I've used GIMP in Windows w/ no problems. Also, as mentioned previosuly, Quake III already exists for the Mac as well. What good are they doing by using software that already exists in ports?

... so that they can show the native version side-by-side with the translated version and show that there is no noticable hit in performance.
/obvious

Details, details, details...

[chill]

The graphic on Transitive's website shows only Unix/Linux operating systems. One of their steps, Operating System Mapping, says "QuickTransit supports operating system mapping between any two Unix/Linux-like operating systems, as well as mapping between mainframe and any Unix/Linux-like operating systems." Doesn't sound like Windows to me.

All of this is supposedly done on the fly, and not beforehand.

Quake and The Gimp wouldn't be my choices to show off flexibility. Quake is OpenGL on Linux and OSX, so there isn't any graphics magic going on. And the ability of BSD-based systems to run Linux binaries is old hat. The Gimp isn't exactly taxing on a CPU as far as user responsiveness goes.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Press conferences for journalists aren't a conducive forum for proving anything. They are a good place to baffle 'em with bullshit, though.

-Charles

Re:OT: where is that from?

[stankulp]

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Stephen Hawking starts his book A Brief History Of Time with an anecdote about a scientist giving a public lecture on the nature of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy. After his talk, an elderly woman rises from her chair and says "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." "Ah. And what is the tortoise standing on?" asks the scientist. "You're very clever, young man, very clever," retorts the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."

http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/native/arts_ cu lture_media/ture_turtles.asp

Misleading article...

[jbarr]

From the /. article:

"...That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa..."

This is a bit misleading, because it's really a "one flavor of *nix on another flavor of *nix" system. Playing a Linux version of Quake III on an OSX Mac doesn't seem like rocket science because of OSX's native BSD roots.

I'll wager that if I took something like "Quicken" or "Microsoft Office Professional" for Windows and tried to run it on a Mac running QuickTransit that it certainly wouldn't work. I doubt if iMovie would run on a QuickTransit-enabled PC. THAT, my friends is the "computer-alchemy" goal. Of course, I would LOVE to be proven wrong on this!

Now, if they are talking about "any program written for Windows [that adheres to QuickTransit Requirements] to run on Linux..." then they may be accurate, but again, this really isn't "universal emulation".

Re:Note to moderators:

[tabrnaker]

maybe it's just not funny?