Re: [Qemu-devel] Potential to accelerate QEMU for specific architectures

[Peter Maydell]

On 26 May 2013 06:40, Lior Vernia <address@hidden> wrote:
> Sorry, right after I wrote the message it occured to me I should have
> mentioned that I was talking about qemu-system, either x86 or i386. At
> the moment I just ran the limbo app on a Galaxy SIII with various
> images, just to see the capabilities, and was disappointed. Limbo
> seems to run v1.1.0.

> I wanted to add that I've been reading about this Russian startup
> that's looking to emulate x86 on ARM at 40% of native speed using
> dynamic binary translation (as far as I gather):
> http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/10/04/x86-on-arm/1
> So this should be possible. And it can't be very much unlike QEMU, can it?

That article suggests they're doing application-level translation,
not system-level emulation. If you:
 * design your emulation from scratch with that use case in mind
   (qemu is system emulation first with app-level as a secondary case)
 * are happy to have just one guest and one target architecture
   (this is actually mostly useful in that it reduces the set of things
   you have to test; it also lets you take shortcuts in corner cases
   for your initial implementation)
 * put more concentrated effort into emulation performance than QEMU

then you should be able to do better than qemu does currently.
You'd probably end up with something like Transitive's QuickTransit/
Rosetta.

thanks
-- PMM