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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?"
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... if nothing runs at all, everything runs equally well.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
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.... :(
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Transitive Software:
1. Vaporware
2. Miracle
4. Coyboy Neal
Personally, I vote it's just Coyboy Neal at it again.
I
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 ;-)
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
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...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Does this mean I can finally get WINE to work under Windows?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
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
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That they claim their software is fast but yet their web site is reaaaaaaaaaaly slow
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)!
...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
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
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.
(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".
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?
my pet machine
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.
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
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
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.
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.
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.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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!
Come play Moral Decay!
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
After reading this, the term Universal Emulator doesn't seem to apply. Here is the text from Transitive's Website:
Honk if you're horny.
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.
11*43+456^2
"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.
/obvious
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
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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."
_ cu lture_media/ture_turtles.asp
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We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
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?
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".
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!