Is it possible to bring up a virtual machine which simulates IBM Power guest architecture (Big Endian) on a machine running x86 host architecture (Little Endian)? Obviously the VM would have to simulate the swapped byte order.
Is anyone familiar with a way to do this?
My instinct says no for several reasons, and even if it is, it may not be a good idea, but I figured I would ask anyway.
22 Answers
Theoretically, sure - but it would be so complex that it wouldn't really be a VM anymore, it would be a simulator with extremely poor performance. Like @Ramhound, I don't know of any packages that do this.
3I was able to find a breakdown of host cpu to guest cpu options here, which I will spend some time looking into. As @John pointed out, the level at which platform virtual machines emulate underlying hardware is based on the difference between the Host Architecture, and the Guest Architecture, which is the real crux of the question: Are there VM products which offer a POWER guest architecture, that can run on an x86 host architecture?
For now, I will look into a few products I recently found. Unless anyone has other solutions.
- QEMU - Open Source
- PearPC - Open Source
- GXemul - Open Source
- Simics - Intel
As a side note, while POWER and PowerPC technically differ, applications written for current POWER architecture are often compatible with PowerPC, and vice versa.
Any feedback on these options would be great as well, if anyone is familiar with them.
