Cameron Laird's personal notes on emulators
"Emulator" means several different, and sometimes conflicting, things.
My interest here is in Unix- (mostly Linux-)hosted (mostly
open-sourced) "mimics" of other
operating systems. This page
serves as a follow-up to my
"Server
Clinic" column,
"Emulate
legacy operating systems on Linux".
I've sorted these notes by "platform":
"Hercules is an open source software implementation of the mainframe
System/370 and ESA/390 architectures, in addition to the new 64-bit
z/Architecture", according to its
home
page. Hercules is quite popular and widely used.
A correspondent wrote me that,
">Flex ES is a proprietary implementation of
'Open 370' [?] ... intended to run on UnixWare and other Unix
platforms ... [and] on Linux as well. It gives about 20 MIPS of
S/390 ... per GHz of Intel silicon, is MP capable, and can run
any historical flavor of OS/390 (MVS-MVT-MFT), VM, or VSE
(DOS/VS-DOS-TOS) and can further emulate any historical flavor
of IBM DASD using a SCSI RAID containers and any historical tape
device using UNIX flat files. (It can attach real S/3x0
tapes and printers using a PCI channel emulator.) I have heard
that it can run configurations that IBM has not been able to
reconstruct for decades, and the savings on maintenance, space,
power and HVAC are absolutely immense." The best information
I've found on this so far is through
Open Mainframe.
isham research has collected a bit
more
information on mainframe emulation.
The
Desktop
Cyber Emulator
"provides a reasonable emulation of a 'typical' CDC Cyber
6600, 7x, 17x based system including common peripherals
such as console, tape and disk drives, card reader, printer
and terminal multiplexer. The emulation runs the following
CDC operating systems: ChippewaOS, SMM, KRONOS 2.1, NOS 1.2,
NOS 1.3, NOS 1.4, NOS 2.2 and NOS 2.8.2. It does not
support NOS/VE ..."
Zane Healy's
"DEC
PDP-11 Emulation Webpage" features SIMH.
"DEC
machines emulation"
Windows
CrossOver Office
has been recommended to me.
[Articles which cover Win4Lin, Wine, ...]
Linux
LXrun
emulates Linux from user-land SCO and Solaris-x86. Author
Mike Davidson put it in the public domain (!?) in 1997.
Cameron
Laird's personal notes on
emulators/claird@phaseit.net