In searching across the net, I've managed to stumble across QEMU, which
may be the best starting point for a project I have in mind. I'd like
some feedback on the difficulty of doing what I propose, or if there are
any more appropriate systems that people are aware of that may better
satisfy my requirements.
Essentially, I have an interest in some older (mid to late 80's) UNIX
computer systems. The one I'm particularly interested in used the
CLIPPER processor (one of the first fully commercialised RISC CPUs) and
a version of SVR3 named CLIX.
I'm interested in adding support for this system to QEMU. In the first
instance, I'd like to get a user-level target working. Without having
looked at any of the source yet, can someone comment on the difficulty
of adding support for a new CPU? Following that, my next biggest concern
is supporting not only the COFF executable format (does QEMU support
only ELF at the moment?), but the translation from the native to Linux
system calls.
As a final complexity, I'd like to (eventually) host all this on Windows
- either natively under Win32, or more probably under the Interix
subsystem included in Microsoft's Services For Unix (SFU). Again, the
question arises regarding the system call translation component - how
much work is involved in adapting this to suit a different (although
still UNIX) target and a non-Linux host?
BTW, before anyone asks, I'm specifically interested in the user-level
target right now. Producing a full system level emulation is
interesting, but I have almost no documentation of the other system
hardware and I think it's going to be quite an exercise in
reverse-engineering to figure out enough to write emulation code.
Regards,
Pat Mackinlay.
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