Reviving the PowerPC Emulator
Friday, July 2nd, 2010I recently found the old test VM I used for developing the Monarc PowerPC Emulator. VMware is a great platform to develop on, with support for GDB remote serial protocol and decent performance compared to straight emulators like Bochs or qemu. However, even with VMware’s superior performance, it was not fast enough to run a PowerPC guest OS interactively. But lately it seems that VMware, and of course computer performance in general, has made some significant improvements since I last tried running a PowerPC guest.
My most recent experience was surprising. My development machine is a 15” MacBook Pro, with 8 GB RAM, an Intel Core 2 Duo clocked at 2.93 GHz, and running Snow Leopard; nothing too shabby. I started up the VM in VMware Fusion 3.1 and was interacting with Mac OS X Panther in about 20 seconds. Amazing.
Now that I have a speedy platform to test and debug the emulator on, I’m going to have to dust off the source and start hacking on it again. For this round I think I will port it to my more recent kernel, which much more capable than the small embedded kernel I wrote originally.
Of course I’ll add some goodies to the project page as things progress.