Emulator and info about sparc (v8) arch

[Dunceor]

Hello all.
I have been looking about develop my own OS to my old Sparc Station 5 (v8) and wonder if anybody knows of a emulator for it (an emulator like bochs, wmware, qemu for x86).

Also wondering if you know if there is anymore information about the architecture except the v8.pdf you can find at sun.com since it's like 300 pages and the intel x86 doc's are like several thousand pages those 300 pages seems a bit small.

Are there anybody here that are tryin to develop OS's for other arch's than x86 because that seems to be the most common (since intel's doc's are good and most people own a x86).

Thanks.

[mystran]

Excuse me but isn't Sparc a RISC architecture? IA-32 is a CISC after all, so basicly, you can probably put the whole Sparc version of the Volume2 of IA-32 manual (the instruction set part) to about 10 pages. Similarly, you can skip most of the exception handling, and Sparc probably does not support both segmentation and paging. There's also likely to be much less backwards-compability notes and such.

So I suspect that there indeed is less relevant information for the Sparc v8 when compared to IA-32 manuals, simply because the Sparc ISA is so much more simple. But that's just the CPU ofcourse.

Anyway, I personally don't remember any such emulator right now, but I'll come back and tell you if I hear of any. I did find http://www.sics.se/simics/ with a quick search but no idea if that's of any use. Look at the "Linux-on-SimICS" link, as they claim it can boot unmodified Linux and Solaris 2.6 (and maybe something else too). Anyway... umm.. maybe it's of some use.

[Dunceor]

Hey.
Thanks for the info.
True SPARC is RISC and it should be less info but still 300 compared to thousands seems weird.

I have yet to read the whole thing (about half left) but I feel some is missing. We'll see, maybe I just read to much.

[df]

i started to write a sparc emulator but didnt get far. the v7+v8 cpus are actually quite complex.. (I was never sold on the whole register window concept either)...

QEMU supports sparc in a sense, you might want to check it out

[Dunceor]

Hey.

Yeah I actually started to write on my own emulator for sparc also since there doesn't seem to exist a good one. Alot of work though so we'll see what happens with it.
I checked out qemu for playin with x86 but it's weird, the man page say u start with qemu <options> but the only bin's that exist on my system is qemu-i386 and more.
I'll check it out some more.
There isn't a chance I could take a look at the code you wrote?

And about being complex, sure just because it's a RISC doesn't mean it's easy it's still alot to do and I bet I got alot of reading to do but 300 pages seemed a little

[mystran]

Register windows aren't actually that bad, although they are next to useless if you need to do deep recursion. Much more evil are the delay slots (doesn't SPARC have those too?).

[Dunceor]

yeah SPARC got delay slots and they are damn annoying. sad thing is that when i learned sparc assembly (had it in a course) we used a emulator (that run on sun/sparc also, was just easier to see what registers changed and what happend) and in the emulator they have removed delay slots so I never got used to them.