[Arm-netbook] One other thing -- emulation question...

[Christopher Havel]

On 10/23/2013 4:53 PM, Scott Sullivan wrote:
> On 10/23/2013 03:47 PM, Christopher Havel wrote:
>> On 10/23/2013 2:54 PM, Scott Sullivan wrote:
>>> On 10/23/2013 02:37 PM, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
>>>>> Quite. We have this functionality already and it's as simple as:
>>>>> apt-get install qemu-system-x86
>>>>>
>>>>> Not sure if debian has packaged the statically-linked version whch
>>>>> lets you run random foreign binaries in chroots, but that's a small
>>>>> matter.
>>>>
>>>> Do you mean qemu-user-x86? That lacks futex() implementation so
>>>> wouldn't run anything more or less interesting... But yep, fixing that
>>>> would be a good task for someone young and ambitious to learn to
>>>> hack ;-).
>>>
>>> $ > ./fix-exclusive-for-inclusive
>>> good task for _anyone_ ambitious to learn to hack.
>>>
>> I'm not ambitious hardly at all, and I don't really like Debian that 
>> much.
>
> You do yourself a disservice in that description. No one is ambitious 
> in all things, but in the schematics you provided, your ambition 
> showed through there.
>
>> Plus, I can't imagine that doing the emulation entirely in software is
>> beneficial performance-wise vs. what I'm suggesting. It's *easier* but I
>> don't think it's *better*. (I'm open minded tho. You're the experts, I'm
>> not.)
>
> Try, but that's the only way to do it unless the hardware was designed 
> for it. So your suggestion about using the second core for the 
> conversion is still a software solution, an ergo there is an existing 
> code base for it with qemu (regardless of which distro you run it on).
>
There's a difference between knowing you can help and contributing, and 
ambition, I think -- I neither need nor want to be a celebrity of any 
kind. I like to help people, but it's for them not me.

As for the programming bit... I type
*./compile**
**make*
and gcc goes off and tries to build me a magic chocolate factory and 
fails dramatically, usually pretty early on. IIRC I've had possibly one 
example where I got it to work without any fatal errors... if that's 
correct it was with a weird and very primitive nothingburger WM. It was 
only available as source code, was very inflexible (changing any 
parameter anywhere required changes to source and therefore a 
recompile), and --most importantly for me-- didn't support a "start 
menu" natively. I was initially attracted because it had an interesting 
way of doing one very minor thing -- the close/minimize buttons were on 
the side of the window rather than in the titlebar. Of course I can't 
remember the name of the WM now... probably just as well.

I have some minimal experience with QBASIC, but that's as successful as 
I've been. I made a minimal text adventure game that worked without 
having a proper parser (trust me, you don't want to know how I did that) 
and I do want to say that I got all the bugs out of it eventually, so 
that it's actually playable through...

I know my strengths and programming isn't one of them. At least I know 
it and admit it...
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