QEMU Accelerator Achieves Near-Native Performance

An anonymous reader writes "QEMU is a generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation. Its sporting a new module called the 'Accelerator' which can achieve near native speeds, and currently runs on Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. This means you could theoretically run Windows (or another OS) on a Linux machine at near native speeds without buying a commercial emulator. The catch is that although QEMU is released under various open source licenses, the Accelerator uses a free (as in beer) license because the module is a 'closed source proprietary product.' Fabrice Bellard does mention that he would consider open sourcing the Accelerator under certain conditions."

Comments

Money?

[cronius]

Open Sourcing the QEMU Accelerator Technology ?
As a supporter of open source, the author accepts to open source the QEMU Accelerator Technology provided a company invests enough money to support the project and to recompense the author from the potential loss of revenue. Interested companies can look at the roadmap and make suggestions to the author.

If it actually achieves near-native performance right now, how much better can it get? And since it's already gratis, would anyone want to pay for one that achives actual native performance?

I don't think there's much money up for grabs here, to be honest. But that depends on how good it really is right now.

Dual licence ?

[Alain Williams]

Why not release under a dual licence as mysql have done ... they seem to rake in money while giving the product away. Yes: most people will have it for free, but some will want to pay (to include in a proprietary bundle/...) - the extra market/awareness that open sourcing it will bring will mean that he will get a slice of a larger cake.

The ignorant laugh

[fm6]

Ha ha. The point is not just that you emulate the processor, but that you emulate the complete environment. In theory, you can do this without processor emulation using the Virtual Machine Monitor feature in IA-32 chips. Unfortunately, nobody except VMWare has figured out how to do this well enough to support guest OSs reliably.

I sometimes want to play old DOS games on my P3 machine. A lot of these games work in Real Mode, period. And they often can't do sound except on specific sound cards. I can:

• Get a second machine for game playing. I don't spend that much time playing games. At least I hope not...
• Reboot to DOS every time I want to run a game. Inconvenient, and the sound doesn't always work.
• Fire up VMWare. Except I can't afford a copy right now...
• Run DOSBox, which emulates not only a 286-class processor, but other legacy hardware such as sound cards and Hercules Graphics.

DOSBox is a really impressive bit of software, but it demands a lot of cycles to get the job done. (Typically, 75% of the CPU time on my P3 when I do VGA games full screen. Playing in a window is impossible unless I step down the color depth of my display.) So it's not good for much except real- and protected-mode games. An open-source emulator that doesn't have that kind of overhead would be very useful.