Port QEMU to HelenOS

[Jiri Svoboda]

Port ​QEMU emulator to HelenOS

Details

QEMU is a machine emulator that is able to emulate environment of various hardware platforms, including PC, PowerPC, ARM or SPARC.
The goal of porting this emulator to HelenOS is to allow developers run the emulation of HelenOS inside HelenOS. It is unlikely that single person would be able to port all features of QEMU to HelenOS. First of all, the scope of QEMU is really big (it offers also means for virtualization) to be ported during such short period. Next, HelenOS itself may not provide all the functionality needed (for example, HelenOS does not provide any graphical toolkit for GUI-oriented applications and working with graphical output in general is currently not as comfortable as in other operating systems).
Because of these limitations, the applicant shall choose a reasonable subset of QEMU features (e.g. it is not necessary to support all emulated peripherals) and focus on porting these. On the other hand, the solution must provide functional emulator with at least rudimentary graphical output.

What Gains and Benefits will this bring?

The biggest benefit of this task is in the ability to run HelenOS inside HelenOS, thus possibly speeding-up development process and, as a more distant goal, develop HelenOS fully inside HelenOS. Also, the ability of an OS to run inside itself (i. e. be self-hosting) can be seen as a proof of matureness of the system.

Difficulty

Medium to difficult.

Required skills

A successful applicant will have good skills of programming in the C language and the ability to survive in a non-standard non-POSIX application environment. Previous experience with development of machine emulator or some virtualization tool would be beneficial to the applicant.

Possible mentors

HelenOS Core Team