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Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.0.1 |
Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.1 |
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================================================================== |
================================================================ |
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Copyright (C) 2003-2006 Anders Gavare. |
Copyright (C) 2003-2006 Anders Gavare. |
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systems (e.g. NetBSD) run as if they were running on a real machine. |
systems (e.g. NetBSD) run as if they were running on a real machine. |
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The documentation lists the machines and guest operating systems that can |
The documentation lists the machines and guest operating systems that can |
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be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best supported guest operating |
be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best working guest operating |
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systems are probably NetBSD/pmax, NetBSD/cats, and OpenBSD/cats. |
systems are probably NetBSD/pmax, NetBSD/cats, and OpenBSD/cats. |
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The most important change between release 0.3.8 and 0.4.0.1 is: |
Changes between release 0.4.0.1 and 0.4.1 include, among other things: |
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o) The emulation of MIPS processors has been completely rewritten; |
o) Some bugs in the dynamic translation core have been fixed, making |
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it now uses the same portable dynamic translation system as the |
all emulation modes (especially the MIPS mode) more stable. |
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ARM and PowerPC emulation modes. |
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On Alpha and i386 hosts (and AMD64 hosts running in 32-bit mode), |
o) In the refactoring effort between 0.4.0 and 0.4.0.1, single-stepping |
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GXemul previously used translation into native code. This release |
(and instruction tracing) of 64-bit programs was accidentally broken. |
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will perform worse than 0.3.8 on those host architectures. |
Single-stepping in 64-bit mode could result in strange exceptions. |
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This has been fixed in 0.4.1. |
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On all other hosts (including AMD64 running in native 64-bit mode), |
o) MIPS emulation performance has been improved somewhat: |
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0.4.0 is likely to be faster than 0.3.8, when emulating MIPS. |
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I think that in the long term, moving towards full portability like |
R3000: After removing some buggy code (hints for physical page |
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this is a good idea. |
translations), it was possible to remove the workaround for R3000 |
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caches which was needed in 0.4.0.1 to make Linux and Ultrix run. |
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This gives an overall speedup for R2000/R3000. |
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(0.4.0 was a bit buggy and unstable; 0.4.0.1 is a quick-fix release.) |
For non-R3000, there have been some speedups as well. After fixing |
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reference count bugs for 64-bit addressing in the dyntrans system, |
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workarounds/hacks in the tlbwr/tlbwi instructions and in the ASID |
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change helper function could be removed. |
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There have also been many other changes, including, but not limited to: |
o) A new -s command line option is now available, for dumping |
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raw runtime data/statistics on every instruction to a file. |
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o) The "test machine" functionality is more well-defined than before, |
Currently, the following kinds of data can be dumped: |
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and some tutorial-like demos have been added. These could be useful |
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e.g. in operating system construction courses. |
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o) NetBSD/sgimips 3.0 works now. This is most likely due to the rewrite |
1. the program counter (virtual address) |
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of the MIPS emulation mode. Previous releases of GXemul only worked |
2. the physical address representation of the program counter |
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with NetBSD/sgimips 2.1. |
3. the internal dyntrans instruction call pointer, useful when |
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developing/optimizing the emulator |
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o) I have begun implementing rudimentary support for GDB remote serial |
This data can then be analyzed by external tools. |
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protocol connections. This means that you can run e.g. the Data |
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Display Debugger, and connect it to a GXemul instance. |
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No advanced GDB functionality is working yet, but starting and |
(There was a -s command line option in previous releases of |
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stopping the emulated machine and single-stepping should work. |
the emulator, but it did not work as intended, and was not |
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usable from dyntrans emulation modes.) |
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Please read the HISTORY files for more details. |
Please read the HISTORY files for more details. |
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Juan Romero Pardines, Alec Voropay, Göran Weinholt, Alexander Yurchenko, and |
Juan Romero Pardines, Alec Voropay, Göran Weinholt, Alexander Yurchenko, and |
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everyone else who has provided me with feedback. |
everyone else who has provided me with feedback. |
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Special thanks to Alec Voropay for testing this release with Linux |
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kernels, and on Cygwin, and also thanks to Ondrej Palkovsky for testing |
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with HelenOS. |
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If you have found GXemul useful in some way, or feel like sending me comments |
If you have found GXemul useful in some way, or feel like sending me comments |
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or feedback in general, then mail me at anders(at)gavare.se. |
or feedback in general, then mail me at anders(at)gavare.se. |
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