On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, Hugo van der Kooij wrote:
> > > 7) Does EM86 have problems with Linux (RH 5.0 say). Is EM86 just as
> good as > > FX!32 or is it a shabby port?
> >
> > I haven't used em86 myself, but AFAIK em86 is better than FX!32. I think
> > FX!32 only runs DOS-programs, no Windows apps. em86 runs Linux/Intel
> > apps.
> > I've heard em86 is based on FX!32 btw.
>
> It is!
Concerning the relation between FX!32 and em86, they use the same code to
turn a stream of x86 instructions into an equivalent stream of AXP
instructions. (That "emulation engine" is only included as an
object--file in the em86 distribution, BTW.)
But AFAIK running Linux/intel binaries on em86 suffers from a much greater
performance penalty than running NT/intel binaries on FX!32.
The reason for this is that FX!32 can be considered as being some sort of
a "just in time compiler": A piece of code gets transformed from intel to
AXP at the time of its first execution. If the same code is executed
again, FX!32 does not do the translation from intel to AXP again, but it
uses the already generated AXP--code (resulting in a _great_ speedup.)
em86 is basically an "80x86 interpreter", i.e. every piece of x86 code is
turned into AXP code each time it is executed.
So em86 is just fine for running mostly interactive applications (as
web--browsers and wordprocessors) since they are mostly idle anyway. But
I´m afraid that you won´t be happy with the Linux/Alpha-em86 solution
if you mainly run compute-bound Linux/intel applications. :-(
Or to sum it up in one sentence: Linux/intel binaries running under em86
work just fine, but they run rather slow compared to native Linux/Alpha
applications.
Maybe you could try to ask your software vendor for a native Linux/Alpha
version of the product. -- Maybe they won´t provide one, but it would at
least show them that there is some interest in such a port.
Sorry for the bad news...
Christian
PS: If em86 has been changed recently in a way that renders all my
statements obsolete, I´d really like to know that... ;-)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
| Christian Czezatke, Student of Computer Science at the Vienna |
| University Of Technology. |
|------------------------------------------------------------------|
| email: e9025461@student.tuwien.ac.at |
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- To unsubscribe: send e-mail to axp-list-request@redhat.com with 'unsubscribe' as the subject. Do not send it to axp-list@redhat.com
Copyright © 1995-1997 Red Hat Software. Legal notices