3 ms·

Dynamo <https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~krishna/courses/2022/odd-cs6013/BalaDusterwaldBanerjiaPLDI2000.pdf https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~krishna/courses/2022/odd-cs60

• drob518 11mo ago
  In the early 1990s, HP had a product called “SoftPC” that was used to emulate x86 on PA-RISC. IIRC, however, this was an OEM product written externally. My recollection of how it worked was similar to what is described in the Dynamo paper. I’m wondering if HP bought the technology and whether Dynamo was a later iteration of it? Essentially, it was a tracing JIT. Regardless, all these ideas ended up morphing into Rosetta (versions 1 and 2), though as I understand it, Rosetta also uses a couple hardware hooks to speed up some cases that would be slow if just performed in software.
  • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    That wasn’t an HP product. It was written by Insignia Solutions and ran on multiple platforms. I had it on my Mac LCII in 1992. It barely ran well enough to run older DOS IDEs for college. Later I bought an accelerator (40Mhz 68030) and it ran better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC
    • hn_acc1 11mo ago
      IIRC, I had that on my Atari ST as well, and it very slowly booted Dos 3.3 and a few basic programs.. enough for me to use turbo-C or Watcom C to compile a basic .c program to display a .pcx file.
    • drob518 11mo ago
      Right, Insignia. That was it. But it was a product that HP resold in some fashion.
  • miohtama 11mo ago
    Apple Arm CPUs have some special tricks to make x86 sogtware emulation faster. https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-fast/ https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-f...