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...