User-visible change between release 0.3.6.2 and 0.3.7 include:
o) The experimental PowerPC emulation mode is now working well enough
to allow NetBSD/prep 2.1 to be installed and run inside the emulator.
It is not 100% stable, and it is not optimized for performance yet,
but hopefully enough for simple experiments.
o) I finally took the time to implement a DEC 21143 NIC; this brings
network connectivity to NetBSD/cats. (The userland "NAT"-like
networking layer is still a bit buggy, and does not work with
everything. However, NetBSD/cats can now be installed via ftp.)
o) CD-ROM images can now in some cases be detected as ATAPI CD-ROMs
instead of IDE harddisks. It works for at least NetBSD, OpenBSD,
and Linux on CATS, and NetBSD on hpcmips.
Internal (code related) changes include:
o) Cleanup of the PCI and ISA bus frameworks; in practice this means
that more code can be shared between different emulated machine
models than before, and that adding new machine types will become
easier.
o) Dyntrans updates; 32-bit PowerPC mostly, but also many performance
related updates for ARM.
The 0.3.6.1 release fixes some issues related to ARM emulation:
x) The emulator can now be compiled inside NetBSD/cats or OpenBSD/cats,
inside the emulator itself. (In 0.3.6, some bugs prevented this.)
x) Performance increase: A non-scientific but realistic test, measuring
the real-world time it takes to do a full NetBSD/cats installation,
seems to indicate that 0.3.6.1 can be twice as fast as 0.3.6 was.
The most imporant user-visible change between release 0.3.5 and 0.3.6 is:
(X) The experimental ARM emulation mode is now working well enough
to install NetBSD/cats and OpenBSD/cats onto harddisk images.
The user-visible changes between release 0.3.4 and 0.3.5 are minor, and
can be summarized as follows:
o) Updates to the (old) binary translation subsystem, resulting
in minor speed improvements.
o) 64-bit MIPS dmult/dmultu has been fixed.
o) slt* instructions for 64-bit MIPS were incorrectly implemented
in the i386 backend. This has been fixed.
Changes:
x) When emulating a network of multiple machines, the emulated
machines can now be placed on different hosts.
x) NetBSD/evbmips can now be installed and run from a disk image.
(There is no INSTALL kernel for NetBSD/evbmips, so you need to
install using another OS, for example emulated NetBSD/pmax.)
x) NetBSD/sgimips can now be installed. Not onto a SCSI disk,
but the files can be exported via nfs from another emulated
machine. The sgimips machine can then netboot. (Read the
documentation for details.)
Several changes are involved since they are all interrelated. These
changes affect about 1000 files.
The first major change is rewriting bsd.builtin.mk as well as all of
the builtin.mk files to follow the new example in bsd.builtin.mk.
The loop to include all of the builtin.mk files needed by the package
is moved from bsd.builtin.mk and into bsd.buildlink3.mk. bsd.builtin.mk
is now included by each of the individual builtin.mk files and provides
some common logic for all of the builtin.mk files. Currently, this
includes the computation for whether the native or pkgsrc version of
the package is preferred. This causes USE_BUILTIN.* to be correctly
set when one builtin.mk file includes another.
The second major change is teach the builtin.mk files to consider
files under ${LOCALBASE} to be from pkgsrc-controlled packages. Most
of the builtin.mk files test for the presence of built-in software by
checking for the existence of certain files, e.g. <pthread.h>, and we
now assume that if that file is under ${LOCALBASE}, then it must be
from pkgsrc. This modification is a nod toward LOCALBASE=/usr. The
exceptions to this new check are the X11 distribution packages, which
are handled specially as noted below.
The third major change is providing builtin.mk and version.mk files
for each of the X11 distribution packages in pkgsrc. The builtin.mk
file can detect whether the native X11 distribution is the same as
the one provided by pkgsrc, and the version.mk file computes the
version of the X11 distribution package, whether it's built-in or not.
The fourth major change is that the buildlink3.mk files for X11 packages
that install parts which are part of X11 distribution packages, e.g.
Xpm, Xcursor, etc., now use imake to query the X11 distribution for
whether the software is already provided by the X11 distribution.
This is more accurate than grepping for a symbol name in the imake
config files. Using imake required sprinkling various builtin-imake.mk
helper files into pkgsrc directories. These files are used as input
to imake since imake can't use stdin for that purpose.
The fifth major change is in how packages note that they use X11.
Instead of setting USE_X11, package Makefiles should now include
x11.buildlink3.mk instead. This causes the X11 package buildlink3
and builtin logic to be executed at the correct place for buildlink3.mk
and builtin.mk files that previously set USE_X11, and fixes packages
that relied on buildlink3.mk files to implicitly note that X11 is
needed. Package buildlink3.mk should also include x11.buildlink3.mk
when linking against the package libraries requires also linking
against the X11 libraries. Where it was obvious, redundant inclusions
of x11.buildlink3.mk have been removed.
The most important/visible changes from 0.3.1 to 0.3.2 are:
x) NetBSD/cobalt can run from a harddisk image. (Installation
must be done using another OS though, for example NetBSD/pmax.)
x) Some minor fixes to make the binary translation system a bit
more stable.
The two most visible changes from version 0.3 to 0.3.1 are:
x) Name change (from mips64emul to GXemul).
x) NetBSD/hpcmips can now be installed and run from a harddisk
image on an emulated NEC MobilePro 770, 780, 800, or 880.
GXemul is a machine emulator. The initial goal was to write a simple
64-bit MIPS emulator for running multiprocessor experiments with a
microkernel, but the emulator can be used for many other things. While
some simulators only simulate a CPU, GXemul also simulates other
hardware components, making it possible to use the emulator to run
unmodified operating systems, such as NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Linux.
[previously known as mips64emul, it was renamed because now
supports more cpu archs than MIPS, as sparc, ppc...]
