| Developer(s) | Anders Gavare |
|---|---|
| Initial release | July 1, 2004; 20 years ago (2004-07-01) |
| Stable release | 0.7.0 / 22 April 2021; 3 years ago (22 April 2021) |
| Type | Emulator |
| License | BSD-style license |
| Website | gavare |
Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (formerly known asmips64emul) is acomputer architectureemulator being developed by Anders Gavare. It isavailable asfree software under a revisedBSD-style license.In 2005, Gavare changed the name of the software projectfrom mips64emul to GXemul. This was to avoid giving the impression that the emulatorwas confined to theMIPS architecture, which was theonly architecture being emulated initially.
Although development of the emulator is still a work-in-progress, since 2004 ithas been stable enough to let various unmodified guestoperating systems runas if they were running on real hardware. Currently emulated processor architectures includeARM,MIPS,M88K,PowerPC, andSuperH.Guest operating systems that have been verified to work inside the emulatorareNetBSD,OpenBSD,Linux,HelenOS,Ultrix, andSprite.
Apart from running entire guest operating systems, the emulator can also be usedfor experiments on a smaller scale, such as hobby operating systemdevelopment, or it can be used as a generaldebugger.
GXemul's processor emulation usesdynamic translation, to convert theemulated processor's instructions into anintermediate representation (IR).The IR is in a format which can be executed by the host. In other words, itshould be possible to port the emulator to new host architectures with justa recompilation; there is no need to implement a native code generation backendfor each host architecture to get it running.
