Systemsim970 written in C, is a full-system simulation infrastructure and tools for the PowerPC 970 instruction set built upon the IBM Power architecture. It provides a Linux full-system simulation to develop, run, and evaluate PowerPC software stack solutions in the absence of PowerPC system hardware.
A PPC970 processor is broadly similar to the IBM processors Apple uses in its G5 mac systems.. if this “system simulation” includes emulation of all the PPc970 functions it could potentially be used to emulate a 64-bit Mac – although presumably many functions would require a 64-bit intel processor to emulate them
“although presumably many functions would require a 64-bit intel processor to emulate them”
i suppose you mean a “64-bits x86 processor” (eh, don’t forget our friend AMD)
Systemsim runs the same on all platforms; this means it can simulate a 64-bit PowerPC on a 32-bit x86 (or a 32-bit PowerPC or whatever).
Systemsim isn’t suitable for integration into PearPC for various technical and licensing reasons. Besides, OS X doesn’t really need a 64-bit processor anyway.
Wes Felter, IBM Austin Research Lab
From http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/systemsim970/requirements?open&S…
Operating systems: Red Hat Linux 8.0, RedHat Linux 9.0, RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, Fedora Core 2, and Fedora Core 3
Computer: x86 machines with a minimum of 3 GB of available hard disk space for installing the core simulator files and rootdisk image
If the above information is incorrect, it needs to be fixed. Otherwise there’s a certain unfathomable irony that a 970 simulator needs an x86 computer to run on.
Will there be a BSD release? The front page says OS X, but nary a mention in the above. That’s not OS X on Intel, is it?
The alphaWorks release of Systemsim is for x86 so that more people can try it. Of course, we regularly run it on Linux/PowerPC64, Linux/x86, Linux/x86-64, and OS X/PowerPC. I haven’t seen OS X/x86 or BSD.
Wes Felter, IBM Austin Research Lab
Excellent news.