Features
Muhammad Mominul Huque edited this page May 15, 2015
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PearPC is an architecture-independent PowerPC platform emulator. It emulates the hardwares that needs to run a PowerPC operating systems.
Currently PearPC emulates the following hardwares:
- CPU: PowerPC G3 and G4
- PCI-Brige: A barebone PCI-Bridge, enough to work with.
- IDE-Controller: Sort of CMD646 with bus-mastering support.
- PIC: A programmable interrupt controller (kind of Heathrow).
- VIA-Cuda: With attached Mouse and Keyboard.
- Network Controller: Emulates a 3COM 3C90x or RealTek 8139.
- NVRAM: Capable of storing 8KiB non-volatile memory.
- USB: A placebo USB-hub. Sufficient to make the client think that it has USB support.
- PROM: Sort of OpenFirmware. It's ugly and contains a lot of hacks but it allows to boot Yaboot and BootX from HFS/HFS+ partitions.
PearPC emulates CPU with two methods:
- CPU GENERIC: Sort of G4, including altivec. A more or less portable CPU. Using this CPU, the client will run about 500 times slower than the host. As of version 0.4 the generic CPU emulation runs well even on big-endian and 64 bit platforms.
- CPU JITC: A very fast CPU for host system that translates PowerPC instructions into host instructions on-demand. Using this CPU method, the client will run about 15 times slower than the host. It has been ported on following systems -
- x86 Sort of G4, including altivec. A very fast CPU for x86 systems that translates PowerPC instructions into x86 instructions on-demand.