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

[Lior Vernia]

Hi Peter,

On May 26, 2013 12:26 PM, "Peter Maydell" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> 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.

What about no to the first bullet but yes to the second (just x86 on ARM)? Any room for significant improvement in that case, starting from the foundations of QEMU?

>
> thanks
> -- PMM