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":

IBM S/390

"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.

CDC

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 ..."

PDP

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