OS X for SSE (qemu), using a lightweight linux distro Options

[JCC]

No I have not, I must have missed it. Can you point me to it? I'm going to try to look for it by myself but if you can save me the time that would be great.

If you were refferring to these instructions I have something better that won't take me too long to do.


From Drag's post:

1. Download SLAX Kill Bill Edition from : http://www.slax.org/download.php
2. Burn ISO to cd using burning software such as "Nero" or "Disk utility"
3. Boot SSE computer using the SLAX CD.
4. At boot screen enter "slax copy2ram" or "slax toram" AND "flux" (for fluxbox desktop)
5. This will take several minutes.
6. After it has copied to RAM and has loaded the GUI, open up an xterm window.
7. Make sure you have a harddrive you can wipe in your pc.
8. You need to format that harddrive as ext2, so if you are ready to wipe it use the command - "mke2fs /dev/sda"
9. Input "Y" and press enter.
10. Then in xterm use these commands : "mkdir /mnt/harddrive" AND "mount -t ext2 /dev/sda /mnt/harddrive"
11. After it has finished creating the partition, connect to a pc on the network via Konqueror (you can open it from the flux menu) e.g (\\computername\).
12. Copy your tiger-x86-flat.img to /mnt/harddrive from konqueror. (open 2 windows)
13. Once that has finished, it will probably take 15 minutes or longer, go to your xterm window and use
"qemu -hda /mnt/harddrive/tiger-x86-flat.img -m 480 -no-kqemu -boot c"
and use "platform=X86PC "Graphics Mode"="800x600x16" -v" as usual.
14. Help me get this working with an accelerator.

---End here---

What I was planning on was a 2.6.18 kernel booting, going into busybox's init process where hwdetect was ran and the appropriate modules were loaded, then a quick check for the proper video driver 1 of 3 choices:
1. Nvidia with HW OpenGL
2. ATI with HW OpenGL
3. VESA with SW OpenGL (Mesa)

load the kqemu module
set /dev/kqemu to 0777
launch X then directly into QEMU fullscreen and if its an nvidia or ati video card you should have some level of acceleration as qemu will use kqemu and opengl via sdl.

What do you think.

[Dragon]

I think it sounds like a good plan but we will have a tough time adding packages that QEMU requires to run. And we can't use kqemu because it virtualizes the cpu emulation. I'll just find the link that I posted.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4VWZ4WUZ

Also, how will it load into ram?

[JCC]

I would load it via the initrd process. That is easy because I have already done all this before minus the QEMU part for some embedded devices I have worked on in the past. I can even refold the initrd into the kernel and thus it be 1 file but that might be overkill.

PS I belive we can overide SSE2 instructions in KQEMU, I'm looking into it right now since KQEMU recently became open sourced.

[Dragon]

Yeah, I suggested that a few pages back that we can select priveleged instructions to virtualize using kqemu source. Anyways, try my iso and tell me what you think of it. If it runs at a decent enough level of speed we can think about going through with your plan or tweaking my iso. I don't care which as long as it's running at a usable speed for everyone.

The other kernel hacking idea will have to wait until we get an experienced coder who can translate the qemu code into code that can be used by the kernel. Remember we need the Mac OS X source file not linux/windows source. Maybe there might be a way to use the non-modified qemu source to emulate seperately as a different app instead of integrated into the kernel. It might be easier to do with just slight performance loss. That way the SSE2 code won't have to be translated into something that the kernel can use. Although it will still require a bit of code in the kernel to call the app.

[munky]

Good work guys, and yeah, I agree the kernel SSE2 emulation is a long way off.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with.

[-TiLT-]

Hmm, I might be wrong, but I think running an illegal instruction would cause a kernel panic that can only be catched by an error trap in the kernel itself and must directly be replaced by legal code before you can run external code again. That leads to the point where you cannot access your external app to emulate sse2 code. But as I said, I might be totally wrong with that.

[Dragon]

I don't understand what you meant by that. Are you saying that an external application can't be called by the kernel or that there are restrictions on what code you can run?
If it's running an external application that's the problem we could just get it to run the source of it instead...

[JCC]

Sorry I got tied up with work today so I didn't get far on the qemu iso image I'm going to look at your slax image real soon but my experience with those images have been they have a lot of bloat for running a specific application need. In other words they try to do everything in as little amount of space as possible when what we need is to do just 1 thing in a little amount of space and do it well.

[JCC]

PS:
OMG I just spent forever trying to go through QEMU's source and it is a HUGE mess. What kind of project doesn't document its operation? Nevermind.


I'm going to skip the kqemu part for now and focus on making slax leaner or replacing it all together.

[Dragon]

http://www.slax.org/download.php

We can always start with Frodo and build from there. We'll see what we can get out of that and we'll probably go with your mini kernel idea.

[Embio]

I'll have a look tonight, just got work to do right now...

[Dragon]

What's happening with my iso? has anybody tested it yet?

[Dragon]

http://www.linuxbios.org/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS

Imagine the speeds we could get with this.

[Dragon]

Everyone still alive?

[munky]

barely, yes.

i havent had a change to dig the P3 out from the garage, sorry.

[Embio]

why would things be faster with LinuxBIOS?

[Dragon]

Using it to load the linux distribution in their video. It would load instantly into linux and would feel as if it were installed natively.

[MacRetail]

I just installed DamnSmallLinux in VirtualBox on a Celeron PC. In the application Sysinfo I saw that VirtualBox is a virtualisator, because it showed the name and the specs of my real processor (including the SSE-only spec). Unless its faking something, I don't think VirtualBox will help us.

[munky]

macretail: thanks for the lowdown. it was a little unclear, but it sounded as if it might emulate missing instructions.

i guess you could try installing a windows guest and try to run one of the SSE2 / SSE3 binaries found here: http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=15102

and see what it does (crash, probly).

[Dragon]

He meant that it wasn't emulating SSE2 or 3. Is there no one with enough time to give me their results for my livecd?