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Emulating a PowerPC OS on Intel


Cannonfodder
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SourceForge.net's project of the month..

 

http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2004-11.php

 

I haven't tried this but it says you can run OS X on an intel box with PearPC.

 

For those of you who may not know, Mac OS X runs OpenBSD (similar to Linux) under the hood. :drum:

 

A link to the faq on the pearpc web site..

 

http://pearpc.net/faqs.php

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True, it is still hella slow, but speed has improved greatly in a short time. Getting quite excited about the devs' current task - 'hwmmu' - don't ask me what it means, but it's intended to reduce CPU workload dramatically.

 

It comes into its own for a webmonkey on the move - all 3 main OSes on one laptop!

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The hardware MMU...

 

Short for memory management unit, the hardware component that manages virtual memory systems. Typically, the MMU is part of the CPU, though in some designs it is a separate chip. The MMU includes a small amount of memory that holds a table matching virtual addresses to physical addresses. This table is called the Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). All requests for data are sent to the MMU, which determines whether the data is in RAM or needs to be fetched from the mass storage device. If the data is not in memory, the MMU issues a page fault interrupt.

 

one possibility is that they are currently emulating the memory management system and would rather allow the hardware to do it, kinda guessing.. would reduce the number of instructions they have to process to emulate the OS. It's the same with the math processor. They have to do all their math (floating point operations so on) with code rather than hardware.

 

What speed CPU and memory are you guys working with (noting that its slow)?

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For those of you who may not know, Mac OS X runs OpenBSD (similar to Linux) under the hood.  :drum:

 

Not trying to start an argument but I need to correct you there Cannonfodder. Mac OS X is not based on OpenBSD and is not directly related to any of the BSD family.

 

Mac OS X consists of two parts: GNU Darwin, an open source Unix-like environment which is based on the BSD source tree and the Mach microkernel, and a proprietary GUI named Aqua, developed by Apple. Yes OS X is UNIX. Some of it is based on FreeBSD but it is generally based on GNU/Darwin and the Mach kernel. Apple are active contributors to the OpenDarwin project which develops teh GNU/Darwin UNIX variant.

 

PearPC does emulate PPC on x86. Last time I ran it on a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4, I got OS X Panther to run at 25Mhz.... it is still very slow!

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Speaking as an OS "slut" who uses more Operating Systems than most people care to count: Solaris, GNU/Linux, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD. All I can say is that OS X is very well hyped :-)

 

I think Longhorn will narrow the gap between OS X and M$. Having played with recent longhorn betas, I am certain of it... sad but true

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Speed the Mac thinks it is:

 

post-4544-1101206811_thumb.jpg

 

Not sure if it's quite that fast in reality... ahem, my GF's Celeron 700Mhz still gives it a run for the money, but I find it quite tolerable given a few optimisations (turning up the redraw interval to 100ms and giving the emu 256Mb of RAM).

 

This is on a Celeron 2.66Ghz host, 515Mb total RAM. And yes, I still frequently see the Beach Ball of Doom...

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