--- trunk/RELEASE 2007/10/08 16:20:10 26 +++ trunk/RELEASE 2007/10/08 16:20:26 28 @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ -Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.0.1 -================================================================== +Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.1 +================================================================ Copyright (C) 2003-2006 Anders Gavare. @@ -10,44 +10,47 @@ systems (e.g. NetBSD) run as if they were running on a real machine. The documentation lists the machines and guest operating systems that can -be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best supported guest operating +be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best working guest operating systems are probably NetBSD/pmax, NetBSD/cats, and OpenBSD/cats. -The most important change between release 0.3.8 and 0.4.0.1 is: +Changes between release 0.4.0.1 and 0.4.1 include, among other things: - o) The emulation of MIPS processors has been completely rewritten; - it now uses the same portable dynamic translation system as the - ARM and PowerPC emulation modes. + o) Some bugs in the dynamic translation core have been fixed, making + all emulation modes (especially the MIPS mode) more stable. - On Alpha and i386 hosts (and AMD64 hosts running in 32-bit mode), - GXemul previously used translation into native code. This release - will perform worse than 0.3.8 on those host architectures. + o) In the refactoring effort between 0.4.0 and 0.4.0.1, single-stepping + (and instruction tracing) of 64-bit programs was accidentally broken. + Single-stepping in 64-bit mode could result in strange exceptions. + This has been fixed in 0.4.1. - On all other hosts (including AMD64 running in native 64-bit mode), - 0.4.0 is likely to be faster than 0.3.8, when emulating MIPS. + o) MIPS emulation performance has been improved somewhat: - I think that in the long term, moving towards full portability like - this is a good idea. + R3000: After removing some buggy code (hints for physical page + translations), it was possible to remove the workaround for R3000 + caches which was needed in 0.4.0.1 to make Linux and Ultrix run. + This gives an overall speedup for R2000/R3000. -(0.4.0 was a bit buggy and unstable; 0.4.0.1 is a quick-fix release.) + For non-R3000, there have been some speedups as well. After fixing + reference count bugs for 64-bit addressing in the dyntrans system, + workarounds/hacks in the tlbwr/tlbwi instructions and in the ASID + change helper function could be removed. -There have also been many other changes, including, but not limited to: + o) A new -s command line option is now available, for dumping + raw runtime data/statistics on every instruction to a file. - o) The "test machine" functionality is more well-defined than before, - and some tutorial-like demos have been added. These could be useful - e.g. in operating system construction courses. + Currently, the following kinds of data can be dumped: - o) NetBSD/sgimips 3.0 works now. This is most likely due to the rewrite - of the MIPS emulation mode. Previous releases of GXemul only worked - with NetBSD/sgimips 2.1. + 1. the program counter (virtual address) + 2. the physical address representation of the program counter + 3. the internal dyntrans instruction call pointer, useful when + developing/optimizing the emulator - o) I have begun implementing rudimentary support for GDB remote serial - protocol connections. This means that you can run e.g. the Data - Display Debugger, and connect it to a GXemul instance. + This data can then be analyzed by external tools. - No advanced GDB functionality is working yet, but starting and - stopping the emulated machine and single-stepping should work. + (There was a -s command line option in previous releases of + the emulator, but it did not work as intended, and was not + usable from dyntrans emulation modes.) Please read the HISTORY files for more details. @@ -167,10 +170,6 @@ Juan Romero Pardines, Alec Voropay, Göran Weinholt, Alexander Yurchenko, and everyone else who has provided me with feedback. -Special thanks to Alec Voropay for testing this release with Linux -kernels, and on Cygwin, and also thanks to Ondrej Palkovsky for testing -with HelenOS. - If you have found GXemul useful in some way, or feel like sending me comments or feedback in general, then mail me at anders(at)gavare.se.