PowerPC x86 Emulator

From openSUSE

With the most current fixes in qemu (new as of 10.3), it is finally possible to run most x86 programs on PowerPC.

Setup

The most important package you will need is qemu. Without this nothing works. By default the x86 subsystem is not installed yet, so you will have to create a mini suse within /emul/ia32-linux/ (use the "Installation to directory" feature in yast if you have an x86 machine handy or just install the packages by hand).

>> can someone, please, elaborate on the paragraph above? It simply doesn't make sense except for the qemu installation part. Also, "Installation to directory" option seems to be no longer available in OpenSuSE 11.0, so how one does do install the x86 subsystem on PPC?

Now run /usr/sbin/qemu-binfmt-conf.sh and you're done! You might need to repeat this step after rebooting.

Check if it works

If everything worked fine you should be able to get a similar output:

agraf@powerpc:~> uname -a
Linux powerpc 2.6.22.1-16-ppc64 #1 SMP Fri Aug 10 06:47:46 UTC 2007 ppc64 ppc64 ppc64 GNU/Linux
agraf@powerpc:~> /emul/ia32-linux/bin/uname -a
Linux powerpc 2.6.22.1-16-ppc64 #1 SMP Fri Aug 10 06:47:46 UTC 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Running programs

To run a program just ignore if the program you want to run is compiled for ppc or x86. Thanks to the binfmt support, the system automagically detects if the program you want to run can be run natively or has to go through qemu. This even works stackable with wine so you can just execute .exe files.

Programs known to work

• All basic tools (shell, shell tools)
• Mplayer (incl. win32 codecs)
• Wine (has to be installed to / and breaks more often than on x86)

rpm --nodeps --ignorearch -ihv wine.rpm

• Flash Player

Programs known to break

• Skype
• The X11 SHM extension does not work correctly