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First post, by kekko

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Looking for docs about virtualization and other techniques, I found
these links (and many others)

Kevin Lawton article on virtualization:
x86 virtualization
The techniques illustred in it are implemented in projects like Plex86 (and maybe vm-ware....)

articles on some undocumented features of x86 cpus, maybe useful for emulation:
http://www.rcollins.org/ddj/
(read in particular the ones on 4mb paging mechanism and on Ev86 mode;
tell me if these could be useful)

If you're interested I may post other links.
I'd like to see one day a version of dosbox running at full host cpu speed...

Reply 1 of 4, by Pseudopode

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Thank you very much for these links.
Personaly I'm always interested in subjects which concern hardware or emulation :
- it allows me to understand how harware works originaly,
- it's helpfull to know how to configure correctly an emulator like DOSBox.

Reply 2 of 4, by wd

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> (read in particular the ones on 4mb
> paging mechanism and on Ev86 mode

These features are only available on pentium+ afaict, but
dosbox has only 80386+some 80486 instructions implemented.
Anyways undocumented stuff is fun, in case you want to post
more links 😉

wd

Reply 3 of 4, by kekko

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hi everybody!
@wd:
I was thinking not to implement these features, but use them
for cpu virtualization, if possible.
Enhanced v86 mode, for example, is useful for emulate some
virtual flags and resolve a major problem of x86 virtualization.
Anyway I'm not so expert and was asking to any of you what
do you think about that.

bye!

Reply 4 of 4, by `Moe`

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Without being too much involved, that's the way dosemu works, and it has it's own set of problems: Using it at all is different on each OS (Linux has an official API for it, but there are some restrictions; Windows may or may not have support for custom virtualizations), it is x86 only, AFAIK even machines running in 64-bit mode can't virtualize 16-bit mode anymore, and the things you can actually do are limited, as dosbox accesses the emulated memory, CPU registers and flags quite often.
Dynamic CPU in contrast is currently x86 only (probably 32-bit only), but could theoretically support more, if some knowledgeable person did the work for a different CPU.

Given the attached problems, that work would probably better be invested in optimizations for dynamic core. (Does it do code optimizations, value tracing or similar? Where would a curious individual like me start fiddling?)