Category Archives: QEMU

Win32 to be dropped from Qemu?

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From an anonymous posting on here, I heard about this:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-08/msg00537.html

since several months, QEMU for Windows (and mingw32 cross builds)
no longer builds without error.

I suspect that the same is true for QEMU on Darwin (lots of errors like
darwin-user/qemu.h:149: error: cast to pointer from integer of different size),
but I’m not sure here because I have no valid Darwin test environment.
Maybe someone can test this.

What about these environments? They have no maintainers.
Should they be marked as unsupported? Are they still used?
Or should they be removed?

Man, I sure hope it’s not the end of the road for Windows hosts running Qemu….

Linux 0.00 & 0.11 on Qemu!

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While checking out oldlinux.org, I came across two things that are somewhat exciting.

The first, is Linux 0.00 The first ever known version of Linux. It’s only two assembly files, an 8086 booter, and the 80386 kernel that sets up protected mode, and two hard coded tasks, then runs the two tasks. It’s very exciting. There is even some commented source available on the oldlinux forum here.

For those who want to check it out, I’ve padded it out onto a diskette image on sourceforge here.

Don’t expect too much, it just prints “AAAA” and “BBBB” over and over, but it’s the first booting version of Linux.

The next thing I found was a BOCHS archive with Linux 0.11 installed, along with GCC 1.40 and a few other programs. This image can even build Linux 0.00 and a slightly modified version of 0.11 that can run bash. I’ve found BOCHS somewhat difficult to configure, and since Qemu is faster, I’ve converted the disk image into a ‘qcow2’, then got it running on Qemu 0.12.5. Just unzip the archive here, and you can be running some really ancient Linux.

Linux 0.00 in action.

Linux 0.00 in action.

Remember that Linux 0.11 is OLD. At this point it didn’t support multiple users, nor did it even have a shutdown or reboot command. Instead we all ran ‘sync’ a dozen times, then pulled the plug. Also it was VERY unstable, and quite prone to panics and crashes.. Although I think a majority of them back then were due to file system corruption from pulling the plug at the wrong time… 🙂

Linux 0.11 on Qemu 0.12.5

Linux also had no support for things like TCP/IP, UUCP, shared libraries, etc… although I’m pretty sure it had working serial port support.. In many ways it feels like 32v, although more primitive. This disk image also has the ability to re-build the patched kernel, and even Linux-0.00. What is also cool is the ‘shoelace’ loader which can boot the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to suffer the boot/root disks of the time, and the fun of hex editing stuff.

For people that love ancient stuff from 1991 this will be great fun indeed!

***UPDATE

For people who are interested in ancient Linux on Windows, I did get the toolchain to build with MinGW, and it seems to work ok!  I have a post about it here.  I have also been able to get the 32bit portion of the Linux kernel to cross compile on Windows as well!  That adventure is here.

Great resource for ancient Linux

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I came across this site, old linux.org That has a bunch of resources for ancient Linux.

They even have a version of Linux 0.11 that can run in VMWare!

However Qemu won’t boot it, because of some issue with the IDE controller…

HD-controller reset failed: 00
Kernel panic: HD controller not ready

I’ve tried a bunch of versions of Qemu to no avail.. It may just be easier to modify the source to Linux, although that’ll require some kind of build environment capable of building early Linux… I don’t know if I’ll do it, as it’d be modifying the old software which clearly worked back in the day, but at the same point it’s behavior that is consistent with a *LOT* of versions of Qemu.

I’ll have to see, but it’d be cool to get 0.11 running under free emulators, and possibly regress back further. I see MINIX is also available on the site so it may be even possible to get 0.01 running…!

Qemu 0.12.5 and OS X 10.4.1

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Well as the maintainer of the SIMH binaries on sourceforge, I end up needing access to a bunch of different platforms to build some prebuilt binaries for non win32 people out there.

As a direct result, I end up emulating many of the platforms, but for OS X, I have an old PowerPC mac mini that I used to build stuff, but I gave it away last year. Anyways after digging around on various networks, I came across this file, “tiger-x86.tar.bz2” So after copying it to my pc, and doing the bzip2/tar decompress shuffle, I had what looked like a VMWare config for OSX on intel.

So I figured this was as good as any test for the latest build of Qemu. After a bunch of experimenting I worked out this was the best way to start it:

qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 512 -hda tiger-x86-flat.img -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -no-acpi -no-reboot -k en-us

Then when the bootloader comes up, I just typed in:

platform=x86pc

Qemu 0.12.5 osx 10.4.1 logon screen

OS X’s logon screen

And away it went!

Now sure it works, but it’s SLOW. VERY Slow. You can remove some TPM extension, and it’ll speed up somewhat, and at least idle like a normal process. After all, I only wanted this setup to build some binaries, not run this like a desktop OS.
To make the bootstring permanent, you just have to open up a termianal window, and edit the file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>

<plist version=”1.0″>

<dict>

<key>Kernel</key>

<string>mach_kernel</string>

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string>platform=x86pc</string>

<key>Boot Graphics</key>

<string>Yes</string>

</dict>

</plist>

Save it, and you’ll be good to go!

For me it was nice that the networking works, so I had an easy way to get source code into the VM, and executables out of the VM. One cool thing about this VM image is that it contains the compiler! I just wonder since it’s super old will it’s exe’s I make run on modern machines…? I don’t have any way to tell, so it may all be in vain.

Even the PPC version of IE works!

Even the PPC version of IE works!

As a test for the heck of it, I downloaded Internet Explorer 5.2 for the PPC version of OSX, and it runs.. It’s too slow to actually use it, although I’ve run it on real intel macs at the apple store, and it FLIES… It’s too bad they killed it IMHO I kind of liked it.

I’m not trying to advocate piracy and all that, but rather show how Qemu can help you run some VMWare disk images, and just how flexible it is.

Qemu 0.12.5 binaries

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This are pretty basic x86 win32 binaries…. I haven’t added anything so they are pretty stock.

The FULL package is here, while a smaller download for people only interested in the x86/x64 emulators is available here.

I’ve only tested Windows NT 4.0/MIPS and MS-DOS but everything seemed to work ok.

Other then that, the move continues….

pcap and IPX/SPX

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I found this link where someone had implemented a virtual NE2000 for DosBOX, allowing you to run among other things DOOM!

This reminded me of my own work to add pcap into Qemu back in the 0.9.0 days… SO I figured I’d try to build the thing out and see how they interact!

So the first thing to do was build DosBOX, and add the patch. I found that 0.73 worked pretty well for this!

So after some hammering around, I got it to build, and launched it on two separate machines (one over terminal server) on my lan, and launched the oldest network doom version I could find to get things going.

Doom multiplayer IPX-SPX

Doom multiplayer IPX-SPX

And there we go. Now in the dosbox.conf you have to make sure that they have unique MAC addresses, and of course, that they are bound to the correct physical nic. in the config file, there is a list option that will print out the possible choices then you can just put the number, or the full name into the right spot on the ini file. I’ve build a prebuilt win32 version of this with all the DLL’s and the gravis ultrasound enabled… You can download it here.

The next thing I did was search high & lo for my patches to Qemu, and thankfully I’d emailed them to myself as it seems all the other places are dead… So with a little playing with Qemu 0.90 to enable the adlib, and remove some logging messages, I’d built a client machine again with Doom. Naturally I had the DosBOX & Qemu face each-other off.. Sadly this is a little SLOW.

DOSBox and qemu IPXSPX Doom

DOSBox and qemu IPXSPX Doom

For those that wish to download, you can find the Qemu client & server files.

Now for Qemu, you’ll need to get that full NIC name… Dosbox provides a great way to see what it is, just paste it into the batch files, and you’ll be good to go.

And remember you’ll need WinPcap installed!!!!!!

Multiuser on Quake for NeXTSTEP!

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The picture says it all…

Its alive!

 

I took the unix timer code, and got that working (not surprising, NeXTSTEP still is 4.3 BSD at heart), and I fixed enough of the key bindings so it’s getting playable. In addition I went back through the WinQuake source and pulled out the BSD networking and that works great. There was a sound driver in there for the next, but it lacks the output functions…. So it would seem that’s the last thing to hack through for a more ‘complete’ Quake experience.. well that & the mouse.

I’ll probably dig around to find out how to make one of those nifty NeXT packages, and release a test version since it’s playable ‘enough’…

In other news, Qemu 0.12.4 has been released! I haven’t even tried it yet, but on my page “MIPS blast from the past” it’s said to be usable…

Slackware 3.5

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A friend of mine was having a hard time trying to configure XF86 from the old Slackware 3.5 days… 1998.

Wow time sure has flown!

Anyways I kind of liked Linux back then as a lot of distros had OpenLook, which made my Linux box feel like a way cheaper SUN box.

While Slackware 3.5 installs great on Virtual PC, the networking just crashes out… So I thought I’d just fire it up on Qemu.

qemu.exe -net nic,model=ne2k_pci -net user -hda Slackware 3.5 Hard Disk.vhd” -L pc-bios -redir tcp:58080::80

And with a bit of tweaking I managed to get it running!

Although with normal VGA there is some weird issues with the cursor…

Slackware 3.5 running openlook

Slackware 3.5 running openlook

It was about as hard as I remember for the xf86config days… you kind of had to mash a few together to get it working…

And if it saves anyone the hassle, here is the XF86Config. (gzipped!)

This is basically regular VGA with a PS/2 mouse… It works on Qemu & Virtual PC, so I’m sure your favorite emulator ought to work as well.