Re: qemu performance emulating sparc64 (UltraSPARC II) running NetBSD

Jason Thorpe <[email protected]> Tue, 26 Apr 2022 17:29:11 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.sparc64
Message-ID <[email protected]>
> On Apr 26, 2022, at 1:49 PM, Erik Fair <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> What are the current best practices for, and performance of, emulating an UltraSPARC II server (e.g. early Sun Fire V125, V215 - no graphics or X11 required; just processor, RAM, disk, and Ethernet) on a relatively modern AMD Opteron (e.g. X3421) or perhaps some flavor of Intel Xeon processor? I’m definitely going to be running NetBSD on the emulated system.
> 
> Emulation always imposes a cost on a per-instruction basis, but if the modern host processor is fast enough, emulation can beat the old silicon. Is qemu there for sun4u UltraSPARC yet?

It’s reasonably good — Qemu is basically a compiler, and the SPARC code is getting translated to native x86-64.

-- thorpej