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Re: svgalib port and emulation questions



>>>>> "mcculley" == mcculley  <mcculley@greatwall.cctt.com> writes:

    mcculley> 1. I think it would be really nice if, when the svgalib
    mcculley> port is available, the X and svgalib versions came as
    mcculley> one executable that autodetected and did the right thing
    mcculley> and also had options to force it one way or the other.

We've thought about this, but it wouldn't be easy right now to support
two different "vdriver"'s simultaneously.  We plan to add a "packages"
feature to Executor that lets us have multiple modular instantiations
of each package interface (video, events, sound, etc.).  We may even
release the source to these packages as dynamically loadable ELF
modules under Linux, and as dynamically loadable ObjC objects under
NEXTSTEP.

    mcculley> 2. What combinations of emulated hardware/emulating
    mcculley> hardware will Executor support in the future?  Will I be
    mcculley> able to run Mac software that is compiled for PowerPC
    mcculley> only?

I'm sure we'll need to support that someday.  Compared to the 68040,
the PowerPC looks like a piece of cake to emulate (all 32-bit insns,
load/store architecture, aligned memory accesses).

    mcculley> Will I be able to get a version of Executor that runs on
    mcculley> the Alpha?

If the market looks promising.  We actually had Executor running on
the Alpha once, back when DEC loaned us one for a while.

    mcculley> If so, will it benefit when the emulated hardware and
    mcculley> the emulated hardware are identical?  Specifically, I
    mcculley> have in mind running MacOS PowerPC apps under AIX on
    mcculley> PowerPC.

In those situations it would make sense to not use an emulator at all
(if we can get away with it).  This is what we do on 680x0 NeXT's
running 680x0 Mac binaries.

-Mat


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