Emulators (Was: Status of the OLPC)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

On 11/24/07 13:56, Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu wrote:
> Thanks for your help. Ok, that works in VMWare! And VMWare is much faster 
> than QEMU...

QEMU is both a full CPU emulator (slow, but portable) or
use a kernel module like VMWare to virtualize the CPU
(fast, but only works on same CPU of the guest).

There are two kernel modules for Linux: KVM and KQEMU.  The former
is included with the latest kernels, but requires a patched emulator
called qemu-kvm (packaged by all distros).

I don't know if a solution like this is also available
for Windows and MacOS X.

A problem I've experienced with qemu-kvm is that, while the CPU
becomes as fast as the native one, graphics output crawls.

So there's some room for improvements, but qemu is mature
and feature rich enough to replace VMware and not make you
feel nostalgic about it.


> I'll post a blog how to easily get it running in VMWare for others.

Why don't you just edit the wiki page instead?  Despite the
scary notices about pages being maintained by the OLPC team,
our wiki is publicly accessible!

Either create a new page and link it around, or add a new
chapter below the qemu one.


> How can I tell what build it is so I can reference "from xxx and up" etc?

Switch to the console: the build number appears above the
login message.  If not, "cat /etc/issue".


> Also what are all the other img files? How to know what is what?

We have jffs2 images for the flash, a plain tar.gz archive,
the crc file, etc.

Some more documentation would definitely be needed, but on
the front page of the wiki you can find a pointer to the
latest updare images.

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