Playing with QEMU
 

Hi everyone,
This night I tried to build QEMU in scratchbox. For the i386 architecture, I had to download the sources of the 2.6.21.7 linux kernel and use its headers as the linux headers (mv /usr/include/linux /usr/include/linux.old && ln -s /usr/src/linux/include/linux /usr/include/linux), because the default headers don't work...
With the ARMEL architecture, I had to do the same thing, but I had also to edit a bit the configure script to make QEMU builds (else it won't recognize the CPU) :
configure : Line 38 : Replace "armv*b" by "arm".

Finally, it worked, and the result is here.

To use it, untar it in '/', QEMU will be located at /opt/qemu/bin/qemu.
In /opt/qemu/share/qemu/afdbd.ima, you will find an old tiny FreeDOS bootdisk I made some years ago (don't try to load the mouse driver with it because it will crash QEMU) ; to use it, type that in a console :
And then open a VNC Viewer (I used vncviewer for maemo on the tablet) and point it to 127.0.0.1.

You will notify it will be slower than every computer you ever seen. When you connect to the VNC server, wait about five minutes to see a cursor, and then you will see the screen slowly filling with characters...

This port is quick and dirty, you have seen it, but as it isn't really useful, it's just for trying and removing ;-)

EDIT : Photo of my N800 running QEMU and vncviewer | Video of QEMU slowly printing the characters...

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

Wonder when you're going to boot Windows 95 on the IT . . . ;)

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

Somebody already did with Bochs and Windows 98 ;-)
I thought QEMU were faster than Bochs, but here it isn't... Or maybe my tablet is really slowed down by something...
You can use the -full-screen option to run it fullscreen without VNC, but in this case be sure to have something that can connect to your tablet with SSH to kill it. It can run too in a window.

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

Too bad - I'm the guilty party on win98/bochs, and had tried qemu, but not been able to build it at the time. Since this isn't an x86 processor, my understanding is that the kqemu kernel module (which vastly speeds up by giving some virtualization on x86) isn't possible. It'd be nice to have a faster emulator, but I suspect that we're close to the limit with current qemu/bochs code.

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

Hello,

I compiled QEMU 0.11.1, and it runs fine on My N800.

Here is a compiled binary of 0.11.1.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/318443/qemu-...-OS2008.tar.gz

(QEMU 0.12.2 can be compiled and runs, but couldnot boot the linux image distributed at the qemu site because the BIOS image has changed to SeaBIOS from bochs BIOS.)

Here are some videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDxfTro03kQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGTnjs9C3fw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJiDfHqYLf0

As seen in the videos, QEMU works fine at reasonable performance.

But the boot process seemed to stop after displaying 'Freeing unused kernel memory: 244k freed' in the last video.
Actually, the emulator system continues to run,
and the virtual machine is also running by monitoring the program counter of virtual machine.
But the proccess stopped even if I wait for 30 minutes, so the virtual machine went into an infinite loop.

If I boot the same boot image on an Intel PC, the boot process goes correctly and finally the shell prompt is displayed.

So it is sure that something is wrong for Nokia N800, but I cannot find out it.

Please help me or let me know some hits to debug.

Thanks.:)

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

hello and thank you for doing this!!

i am curious, does your port of qemu support 'user mode'?

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

I added qemu-i386 into http://dl.dropbox.com/u/318443/qemu-...-OS2008.tar.gz, which supports i386 linux user mode emulation.
Use it as follows:
qnemul/qemu-i386 can be found in linux-user-test-0.3.tar.gz, can be obtained from http://wiki.qemu.org/Download

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

Tamakoshi Hiroki,

i appreciate your quick reply,

the reason i'm asking about user mode is that i'm hoping to try wine in qemu user mode on the n800. i'm not expecting anything amazing, but if we could run, for example, an old PC game that is neither executable under dos or scummvm, that would be awesome.

if you're interested, would you try wine and share your steps in doing so?

i found a post of people trying this very same thing on a predecessor to the n800, the Zaurus SL-C3100.
http://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=14829

:)

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

I checked linux image from old qemu, and it also hangs on freeing kernel memory. Win95 stops responding when it's switching into graphics mode.

but it's a nice progress

by the way, maybe somebody try with the newest bochs, somebody ran win xp on htc leo (winmo with 1ghz snapdragon) with 5 min bootime using bochs 2.4.2

Re: Playing with QEMU
 

can you upload also this one?