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Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu for x86 plugins on PPC?


From: Ronnie Misra
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu for x86 plugins on PPC?
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 10:51:30 -0700

On Aug 24, 2004, at 7:54 AM, Paul Brook wrote:

On Tuesday 24 August 2004 15:40, Wim Vanderbauwhede wrote:
Hi qemu-guru's,

Would it be possible to use qemu to have x86 plugins work in a PPC
browser? The plugins for mozilla are .so shared libraries, so I imagine
that it should be possible based on usermode qemu-i386.
A Flash-plugin for mozilla on PPC is a kind of holy grail, it would be
great if qemu could provide this.

I don't think this is going to work.
Shared objects (.so) are quite tightly tied into the main executable. For example they're likely to share memory structures, with no cleanly defined interface between them. You're effectively asking qemu link together code
compiled for two (very) different targets into a single executable.

By contrast the linux syscall layer emulated by qemu-user is clean, well
defined, and relatively simple.

However, you should be able to run x86 mozilla with x86 plugins under qemu on
a PPC machine. I haven't tried this.

It might be true that shared objects are tightly tied into the executable in the general case, but in the specific case of mozilla plugins, there is a defined interface between the plugin and the executable - the Netscape plugin API:

<http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/>

Crossover has a product to let x86-linux users use Windows plugins in Mozilla, and it works well enough to let you use the Windows QuickTime plugin...

Ronnie





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