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GXemul:  Release notes

Release notes for GXemul 0.4.6.3

Copyright (C) 2003-2008 Anders Gavare


GXemul is a framework for full-system computer architecture emulation. Several processor architectures and machine types have been implemented. It is working well enough to allow unmodified "guest" operating systems to run inside the emulator, as if they were running on real hardware.

The emulator emulates (networks of) real machines. The machines may consist of ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and SuperH processors, and various surrounding hardware components such as framebuffers, busses, interrupt controllers, ethernet controllers, disk controllers, and serial port controllers.

The documentation lists the machines and guest operating systems that can be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best working guest operating systems are NetBSD/pmax and NetBSD/cats.


The changes between release 0.4.6 and 0.4.6.1 are mostly focused on documentation updates, to reflect new releases of guest operating systems:

The changes between release 0.4.6.1 and 0.4.6.3 are:

Please read the HISTORY file for more details.

(Note that I am no longer actively developing the 0.4.x series of GXemul. I have begun a complete rewrite in C++, which will become 0.5.0 some day. If you have feedback or bugfixes for the 0.4.x series, then let me know; perhaps there will be more 0.4.x releases if there are enough important fixes before 0.5.0 is ready.)


Files included in this release are:

    HISTORY                       Detailed revision history / changelog.
    LICENSE                       Copyright message / license.
    README                        Quick start instructions, for the impatient.
    RELEASE.html                  This file.
    TODO                          TODO notes.
    configure, Makefile.skel      sh and make scripts for building GXemul.
    demos/                        Tutorial-like demos of testmachine functionality.
    doc/                          Documentation.
    experiments/                  Experimental code. (Usually not needed.)
    man/                          Man page.
    src/                          Source code.

To build the emulator, run the configure script, and then run make. This should work on most Unix-like systems, with few or no modifications to the source code.

Regarding files in the src/include/ directory: only some of these are written by me, the rest are from other sources (such as NetBSD). The license text says that "All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software" must display acknowledgements. Even though I do not feel that I mention features or use of the header files (the "software") in any advertising materials, I am still very grateful for the fact that these people have made their files available for re-use, as Free software, so regardless of legal requirements, I guess thanking them like this is in order:

    This product includes software developed by the University of
    California, Berkeley and its contributors.

    This product includes software developed for the
    NetBSD Project.  See http://www.netbsd.org/ for
    information about NetBSD.

    This product includes software developed by Jonathan Stone for
    the NetBSD Project.

    This product includes software developed for the NetBSD Project
    by Matthias Drochner.

    This product includes software developed by the NetBSD
    Foundation, Inc. and its contributors.

    This product includes software developed by Christopher G. Demetriou.
    [for the NetBSD Project.]

    This product includes software developed by Adam Glass.

    This product includes software developed by the PocketBSD project
    and its contributors.

    This product includes software developed by Peter Galbavy.

    Carnegie Mellon University   (multiple header files,
    no specific advertisement text required)

    This product includes software developed by Charles M. Hannum.

    This product includes software developed under OpenBSD by Per Fogelström.

    This product includes software developed by Per Fogelström.

    This product includes software developed at Ludd, University of
    Luleå, Sweden and its contributors.

    This product includes software developed by Hellmuth Michaelis
    and Joerg Wunsch

    The font(s) in devices/fonts are Copyright (c) 1992, 1993, 1994
    by Hellmuth Michaelis and Joerg Wunsch.  ("This product includes software
    developed by Hellmuth Michaelis and Joerg Wunsch", well, the font
    is maybe not software, but still...)

    impactsr-bsd.h is Copyright (C) 2004 by Stanislaw Skowronek.

    This product includes software developed for the NetBSD Project by
    Wasabi Systems, Inc.  [by Simon Burge]

    arcbios_other.h is Copyright (c) 1996 M. Warner Losh.

    This product includes software developed by Marc Horowitz.

    This product includes software developed by Brini.

    This product includes software developed by Mark Brinicombe
    for the NetBSD Project.

    This product includes software developed by TooLs GmbH.

    This product includes software developed by Manuel Bouyer.

    This product includes software developed by the Alice Group.

    This product includes software developed by Ichiro FUKUHARA.

    This product includes software developed by Marcus Comstedt.

    This product includes software developed by Bill Paul.

    This product includes software developed by Nivas Madhur.

Also, src/include/alpha_rpb.h requires the following:

    Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 Carnegie-Mellon University.
    All rights reserved.

    Author: Keith Bostic, Chris G. Demetriou

    Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and
    its documentation is hereby granted, provided that both the copyright
    notice and this permission notice appear in all copies of the
    software, derivative works or modified versions, and any portions
    thereof, and that both notices appear in supporting documentation.

See individual files for license details, if you plan to redistribute GXemul or reuse code.

GXemul's homepage is http://gavare.se/gxemul/.

If you have found GXemul useful in some way, or feel like sending me comments or feedback in general, then mail me at anders(@At)gavare.se.