Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-ID: <3CF23C83.8090107@goingware.com> Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 09:02:43 -0500 From: "Michael D. Crawford" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020412 Debian/0.9.9-6 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Re: Is cygwin Linux. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > One of the biggest differences >is that Sparc binaries are bigendian while IA32 are little endian in >ordering. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to create a > software emulator. That's not really true. Connectix Virtual PC can run little endian x86 executables in a virtual machine under windows or linux on a big-endian Macintosh powerpc. What's more of an issue is that I believe sparc has lots of registers but x86 doesn't. That makes it very innefficient to emulate, because you can't devote a real register to each emulated register. Virtual PC, as well as the 68k emulator that is built into PowerPC macs, can do so and have registers left over the internal operation of the emulator. You could still do it, you'd just be swapping registers out to ram and back all the time, which would be very slow. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ crawford AT goingware DOT com Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/