The Game Machine

Introduction

• Background– The project is to create a new type of 3D game machine

architecture on embedded system device.– We will discuss the plausible design of the new hardware

platform and how it might be implemented.

• Our Job– Build an emulator to simulate hardware platform.– Figure out the future work.

Projected Timeline• 1st year

– Study and survey based on QEMU platform– Propose Portable and Stable Architecture– Basic Emulator Platform (QEMU-mp).

• 2nd year – Add New Device on Emulator Platform.– Support Basic Emulator Platform with partial devices.

• 3nd year – Insertion of miscellaneous devices and peripherals– Support I/O Emulation Platform

About QEMU (1)

• QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

• QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performances.

About QEMU (2)

• Dynamic translation - Dynamic translators convert code as needed. - Try to spend most time executing in translation cache. - Translate basic blocks as needed. - Store translated blocks in code cache.

About QEMU (3)

• Memory management – QEMU uses the mmap() system call to emulate the target MMU. – QEMU also supports a software MMU.

• QEMU uses an address translation cache to speed up the translation.

– QEMU uses a physically indexed translation cache.– When MMU mappings change, the chaining of the TBs is reset.

Reference 1. Fabrice Bellard, “QEMU a Fast and Portable Dynamic Translator” USENIX

Association FREENIX Track: 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference2. Erik van der Kouwe, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “ Porting the QEMU

virtualization software to MINIX 3” , 12 August 20093. Nathaniel Wesley Filardo, “Porting QEMU to Plan 9: QEMU Internals and

Port Strategy”, September 11, 20074. http://www.qemu.org/qemu-doc.html5. http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Qemu6. http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen