Re: [Qemu-devel] Stuff.

[Timo Savola]

> Has anyone considered the possibility of emulating libc, rather than
> emulating system calls? That's what em86 used to do for emulating i386
> code on Alpha -- rather than letting it run a 'real' non-native libc and
> then emulating only syscalls. 

I guess that wouldn't work very well with statically linked
applications.  Or when some other C library is used (uClibc).

Also, since the library and application code share global variables, it
would be next to impossible to know what data to convert to different
byte order and when.

> I appreciate that syscalls are a far more stable ABI to be emulating,
> and there are far fewer structures to convert -- but wouldn't it be
> faster to emulate the library itself? Especially if we can extend that
> to emulate libX11 too :)

I don't think the stability is so much of an issue than the size of the
interface.

Timo