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Re: [Qemu-devel] Useful Q&A


From: Johannes Schindelin
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Useful Q&A
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:25:06 +0200 (CEST)

Hi,

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Benjamin Brown wrote:
> >> Will support for newer graphics cards be included any time soon?
> > No.
> Is this sort of thing difficult (I've not written an emulator before)?

Why on earth would you want to do that? It is an *emulated* graphics card.
So any card which works should be fine. There is no point of maintaining
two or more solutions to the same problem.

> To me the i386 support seems to be pointless - anybody who is seriously
> going to be running QEMU will be using a minimum of a i586 (K6-2,
> Pentium etc), granted QEMU it is not intended for just this processor
> platform - what is the justification for a 386 compatible version....? :)

Well, there is more to it than just focusing on the newest, fastest, best
processor there is.

First, why do you suppose at all, that the main use of QEMU is on INTEL
platform? There are quite a few 386 compatible processors, and while not
exactly being slow, they do not all support INTEL extensions.

Second, you need time to write the special support for all those
extensions. Don't underestimate the effort!

Third, any day of the week I would rather fix things that don't work yet
than fine tune some performance issues.

Fourth, I strongly doubt that supporting those extensions does have a high
impact on performance: They are too special. They are mainly for large
vector an matrix calculations, and last time I checked, a word processor
does not really use many of those.

> Excellent software all round - wish I had the technical know how!

Use the source, Luke!

This is good for two reasons: You will learn a lot, especially how
well-written code looks like. And you will be able to turn on debugging
options, to understand what exactly happens, and to contribute back what
you learnt as a means of saying "Thanks".

Ciao,
Dscho





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