/[gxemul]/trunk/RELEASE

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-revision 26 by dpavlin,
Mon Oct  8 16:20:10 2007 UTC
+revision 32 by dpavlin,
Mon Oct  8 16:20:58 2007 UTC
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- Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.0.1
+ Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.3
- ==================================================================
+ ================================================================
  Copyright (C) 2003-2006  Anders Gavare.
 Line 10 
 hardware components are emulated well en
  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 0.4.2 and 0.4.3 include, among other things:
-     o)  The emulation of MIPS processors has been completely rewritten;
+     o)  SuperH (SH4) emulation is now stable enough to let a NetBSD/dreamcast
-         it now uses the same portable dynamic translation system as the
+         GENERIC_MD (ramdisk) kernel reach userland.
-         ARM and PowerPC emulation modes.
-         On Alpha and i386 hosts (and AMD64 hosts running in 32-bit mode),
+     o)  There is now a simple framework for letting emulated clocks, as seen
-         GXemul previously used translation into native code. This release
+         by guest operating systems, run at the same speed as the host clock.
-         will perform worse than 0.3.8 on those host architectures.
-         On all other hosts (including AMD64 running in native 64-bit mode),
+         So far, the DECstation, MobilePro (hpcmips), NetWinder, CATS, Malta
-.4.0 is likely to be faster than 0.3.8, when emulating MIPS.
+         (evbmips), Cobalt, Algor, Dreamcast, and testmips machine modes
+         use the new clock/timer framework.
-         I think that in the long term, moving towards full portability like
+     o)  Some changes to the way expressions are evaluated in the built-in
-         this is a good idea.
+         debugger, and some changes in command behaviour:
- (0.4.0 was a bit buggy and unstable; 0.4.0.1 is a quick-fix release.)
+           x)  Expressions (including assignments) can now be arbitrarily
+               complex, using parentheses, and the following operators:
- There have also been many other changes, including, but not limited to:
+                   + - * /    % (modulo)  ^ (xor)  & (and)  | (or)
-     o)  The "test machine" functionality is more well-defined than before,
+           x)  Some internal emulator variables can now be read/written using
-         and some tutorial-like demos have been added. These could be useful
+               normal expressions. Examples of commands that did not work
-         e.g. in operating system construction courses.
+               earlier, but should work now:
-     o)  NetBSD/sgimips 3.0 works now. This is most likely due to the rewrite
+                   print verbose
-         of the MIPS emulation mode. Previous releases of GXemul only worked
+                   r5 = sp - arch_pagesize * 4
-         with NetBSD/sgimips 2.1.
+                   machine[0].statistics_enabled = 1
-     o)  I have begun implementing rudimentary support for GDB remote serial
+           x)  To force a name to be interpreted as a setting/register name,
-         protocol connections. This means that you can run e.g. the Data
+               a hash sign (#) is now used instead of the percentage sign (%).
-         Display Debugger, and connect it to a GXemul instance.
+               (In the new expression evaluator, % means arithmetic modulo.)
-         No advanced GDB functionality is working yet, but starting and
+           x)  The 'focus' command now also selects a cpu, in addition to
-         stopping the emulated machine and single-stepping should work.
+               selecting machine and emul.
+           x)  The 'reg' command only prints registers for one cpu now, not
+               all cpus in the currently focused machine.
+     o)  The wdc (standard IDE controller) had a bug which prevented disk
+         images larger than 2 GB to work correctly. This has been fixed.
+     o)  For MIPS emulation, some combinations of emulated processor + guest
+         operating system should now work better when idling (i.e. the host
+         should not run at 100% CPU):
+           x)  For MIPS32/MIPS64 and RM5200, the 'wait' instruction should
+               now work more or less as expected.
+           x)  For VR41xx (e.g. MobilePro) emulation, the standby instruction
+               should work like the 'wait' instruction.
+           x)  For R3000 emulation, where there is no hardware wait instruction,
+               I've implemented "instruction combination" hacks for both
+               NetBSD/pmax and Debian/pmax, so that their cpu idle loops are
+               detected and treated almost as a wait instruction.
+     o)  MIPS 64-bit address translation (X=1) was not fully working before;
+         TLB exception handling for xkseg and larger-than-2GB-userland should
+         now actually work. (Thanks to Juli Mallett and Carl van Schaik for
+         noticing these problems.)
+     o)  The mouse cursor update routines in DECstation (LK201) emulation
+         previously used the fact that guest OSes set the _hardware_
+         cursor position. In order to support X Windows when emulating
+         modern versions of NetBSD/pmax, which don't set the hardware
+         position anymore, a workaround has been implemented which only
+         sends relative coordinates to the guest OS. This has two drawbacks:
+. Ultrix emulation with dual- and tripple-head emulation will
+            most likely feel very strange. It will still work, though.
+. Cursor movement feels "accelerated", because the emulator
+            sends unaccelerated movements to the guest OS, which then
+            accelerates them. This can however be compensated to some
+            degree by running 'xset m 1 0' in the guest OS.
+         Having weird accelerated mouse movement is better than having no
+         mouse support at all, so this change was necessary.
  Please read the HISTORY files for more details.
-Line 146 
 them like this is in order:
+Line 190 
 them like this is in order:
      This product includes software developed by Ichiro FUKUHARA.
+     This product includes software developed by Marcus Comstedt.
  Also, src/include/alpha_rpb.h requires the following:
      Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 Carnegie-Mellon University.
-Line 163 
 See individual files for license details
+Line 209 
 See individual files for license details
  or reuse code.
- Thanks to (in no specific order) Joachim Buss, Olivier Houchard, Juli Mallett,
- Juan Romero Pardines, Alec Voropay, G�ran 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.

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