Messages in this thread |  | | From | ulmo@q ... | Subject | Re: [off-topic] Fully virtualisable CPUs | Date | 08 Sep 1996 01:42:50 -0400 |
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Alan Cox <alan@cymru.net> writes:
> On the intel chips instructions that report the CPU state don't cause > an exception. Pity as if they did we could conceivably just boot windows95 > or nt or OS/2 or whatever in a window (and vice versa).
> Alan
It seems to me trivial to have a little virtualisable module which simply picked up an instruction, examined it for whether it was trying to get a report on CPU state, and then recoded the instructions to do the CPU state manually, and at the end of the code piece jump back into the little just-in-time-interpreting-reassembler for the next instruction.
Yeah it would run slow the first few times a process ran, but it would leave a long trail of compiled piecelets, and without too much difficulty that could be cached on disk along with the executable so that next time the executable was run the loader would load the cache'd interpreted reassembled progress. In this way, one could even boot a new version of Linux in a Linux window, or FreeBSD, or NT, or Windows '95, or ... CP/M :) or Solaris 'x86 ... Heck I can do this myself. Anybody have references on:
* x86 instruction set
on the Internet someplace I could borrow?
I could just use the FreeBSD boot disk as a testbed ...
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