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Message-ID: <3CF23C83.8090107@goingware.com>
Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 09:02:43 -0500
From: "Michael D. Crawford" <crawford AT goingware DOT com>
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Subject: Re: Is cygwin Linux.
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 > 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
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crawford AT goingware DOT com

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