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because it is known at translation time.


<P>
In order to increase performances, a backward pass is performed on the
generated simple instructions (see
<CODE>target-i386/translate.c:optimize_flags()</CODE>). When it can be proved that
the condition codes are not needed by the next instructions, no
condition codes are computed at all.




<H2><A NAME="SEC12" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC12">2.5 CPU state optimisations</A></H2>

<P>
The x86 CPU has many internal states which change the way it evaluates
instructions. In order to achieve a good speed, the translation phase
considers that some state information of the virtual x86 CPU cannot
change in it. For example, if the SS, DS and ES segments have a zero
base, then the translator does not even generate an addition for the
segment base.


<P>
[The FPU stack pointer register is not handled that way yet].




<H2><A NAME="SEC13" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC13">2.6 Translation cache</A></H2>

<P>
A 16 MByte cache holds the most recently used translations. For
simplicity, it is completely flushed when it is full. A translation unit
contains just a single basic block (a block of x86 instructions
terminated by a jump or by a virtual CPU state change which the
translator cannot deduce statically).




<H2><A NAME="SEC14" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC14">2.7 Direct block chaining</A></H2>

<P>
After each translated basic block is executed, QEMU uses the simulated
Program Counter (PC) and other cpu state informations (such as the CS
segment base value) to find the next basic block.


<P>
In order to accelerate the most common cases where the new simulated PC
is known, QEMU can patch a basic block so that it jumps directly to the
next one.


<P>
The most portable code uses an indirect jump. An indirect jump makes
it easier to make the jump target modification atomic. On some host
architectures (such as x86 or PowerPC), the <CODE>JUMP</CODE> opcode is
directly patched so that the block chaining has no overhead.




<H2><A NAME="SEC15" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC15">2.8 Self-modifying code and translated code invalidation</A></H2>

<P>
Self-modifying code is a special challenge in x86 emulation because no
instruction cache invalidation is signaled by the application when code
is modified.


<P>
When translated code is generated for a basic block, the corresponding
host page is write protected if it is not already read-only (with the
system call <CODE>mprotect()</CODE>). Then, if a write access is done to the
page, Linux raises a SEGV signal. QEMU then invalidates all the
translated code in the page and enables write accesses to the page.


<P>
Correct translated code invalidation is done efficiently by maintaining
a linked list of every translated block contained in a given page. Other
linked lists are also maintained to undo direct block chaining. 


<P>
Although the overhead of doing <CODE>mprotect()</CODE> calls is important,
most MSDOS programs can be emulated at reasonnable speed with QEMU and
DOSEMU.


<P>
Note that QEMU also invalidates pages of translated code when it detects
that memory mappings are modified with <CODE>mmap()</CODE> or <CODE>munmap()</CODE>.


<P>
When using a software MMU, the code invalidation is more efficient: if
a given code page is invalidated too often because of write accesses,
then a bitmap representing all the code inside the page is
built. Every store into that page checks the bitmap to see if the code
really needs to be invalidated. It avoids invalidating the code when
only data is modified in the page.




<H2><A NAME="SEC16" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC16">2.9 Exception support</A></H2>

<P>
longjmp() is used when an exception such as division by zero is
encountered. 


<P>
The host SIGSEGV and SIGBUS signal handlers are used to get invalid
memory accesses. The exact CPU state can be retrieved because all the
x86 registers are stored in fixed host registers. The simulated program
counter is found by retranslating the corresponding basic block and by
looking where the host program counter was at the exception point.


<P>
The virtual CPU cannot retrieve the exact <CODE>EFLAGS</CODE> register because
in some cases it is not computed because of condition code
optimisations. It is not a big concern because the emulated code can
still be restarted in any cases.




<H2><A NAME="SEC17" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC17">2.10 MMU emulation</A></H2>

<P>
For system emulation, QEMU uses the mmap() system call to emulate the
target CPU MMU. It works as long the emulated OS does not use an area
reserved by the host OS (such as the area above 0xc0000000 on x86
Linux).


<P>
In order to be able to launch any OS, QEMU also supports a soft
MMU. In that mode, the MMU virtual to physical address translation is
done at every memory access. QEMU uses an address translation cache to
speed up the translation.


<P>
In order to avoid flushing the translated code each time the MMU
mappings change, QEMU uses a physically indexed translation cache. It
means that each basic block is indexed with its physical address. 


<P>
When MMU mappings change, only the chaining of the basic blocks is
reset (i.e. a basic block can no longer jump directly to another one).




<H2><A NAME="SEC18" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC18">2.11 Hardware interrupts</A></H2>

<P>
In order to be faster, QEMU does not check at every basic block if an
hardware interrupt is pending. Instead, the user must asynchrously
call a specific function to tell that an interrupt is pending. This
function resets the chaining of the currently executing basic
block. It ensures that the execution will return soon in the main loop
of the CPU emulator. Then the main loop can test if the interrupt is
pending and handle it.




<H2><A NAME="SEC19" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC19">2.12 User emulation specific details</A></H2>



<H3><A NAME="SEC20" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC20">2.12.1 Linux system call translation</A></H3>

<P>
QEMU includes a generic system call translator for Linux. It means that
the parameters of the system calls can be converted to fix the
endianness and 32/64 bit issues. The IOCTLs are converted with a generic
type description system (see <TT>`ioctls.h'</TT> and <TT>`thunk.c'</TT>).


<P>
QEMU supports host CPUs which have pages bigger than 4KB. It records all
the mappings the process does and try to emulated the <CODE>mmap()</CODE>
system calls in cases where the host <CODE>mmap()</CODE> call would fail
because of bad page alignment.




<H3><A NAME="SEC21" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC21">2.12.2 Linux signals</A></H3>

<P>
Normal and real-time signals are queued along with their information
(<CODE>siginfo_t</CODE>) as it is done in the Linux kernel. Then an interrupt
request is done to the virtual CPU. When it is interrupted, one queued
signal is handled by generating a stack frame in the virtual CPU as the
Linux kernel does. The <CODE>sigreturn()</CODE> system call is emulated to return
from the virtual signal handler.


<P>
Some signals (such as SIGALRM) directly come from the host. Other
signals are synthetized from the virtual CPU exceptions such as SIGFPE
when a division by zero is done (see <CODE>main.c:cpu_loop()</CODE>).


<P>
The blocked signal mask is still handled by the host Linux kernel so
that most signal system calls can be redirected directly to the host
Linux kernel. Only the <CODE>sigaction()</CODE> and <CODE>sigreturn()</CODE> system
calls need to be fully emulated (see <TT>`signal.c'</TT>).




<H3><A NAME="SEC22" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC22">2.12.3 clone() system call and threads</A></H3>

<P>
The Linux clone() system call is usually used to create a thread. QEMU
uses the host clone() system call so that real host threads are created
for each emulated thread. One virtual CPU instance is created for each
thread.


<P>
The virtual x86 CPU atomic operations are emulated with a global lock so
that their semantic is preserved.


<P>
Note that currently there are still some locking issues in QEMU. In
particular, the translated cache flush is not protected yet against
reentrancy.




<H3><A NAME="SEC23" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC23">2.12.4 Self-virtualization</A></H3>

<P>
QEMU was conceived so that ultimately it can emulate itself. Although
it is not very useful, it is an important test to show the power of the
emulator.


<P>
Achieving self-virtualization is not easy because there may be address
space conflicts. QEMU solves this problem by being an executable ELF
shared object as the ld-linux.so ELF interpreter. That way, it can be
relocated at load time.




<H2><A NAME="SEC24" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC24">2.13 Bibliography</A></H2>

<DL COMPACT>

<DT><A NAME="BIB1">[1]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/piumarta98optimizing.html">http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/piumarta98optimizing.html</A>, Optimizing
direct threaded code by selective inlining (1998) by Ian Piumarta, Fabio
Riccardi.

<DT><A NAME="BIB2">[2]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/">http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/</A>, Valgrind, an open-source
memory debugger for x86-GNU/Linux, by Julian Seward.

<DT><A NAME="BIB3">[3]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://bochs.sourceforge.net/">http://bochs.sourceforge.net/</A>, the Bochs IA-32 Emulator Project,
by Kevin Lawton et al.

<DT><A NAME="BIB4">[4]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://www.cs.rose-hulman.edu/~donaldlf/em86/index.html">http://www.cs.rose-hulman.edu/~donaldlf/em86/index.html</A>, the EM86
x86 emulator on Alpha-Linux.

<DT><A NAME="BIB5">[5]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt97/@/full_papers/chernoff/chernoff.pdf">http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt97/@/full_papers/chernoff/chernoff.pdf</A>,
DIGITAL FX!32: Running 32-Bit x86 Applications on Alpha NT, by Anton
Chernoff and Ray Hookway.

<DT><A NAME="BIB6">[6]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://www.willows.com/">http://www.willows.com/</A>, Windows API library emulation from
Willows Software.

<DT><A NAME="BIB7">[7]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/">http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/</A>, 
The User-mode Linux Kernel.

<DT><A NAME="BIB8">[8]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://www.plex86.org/">http://www.plex86.org/</A>, 
The new Plex86 project.

<DT><A NAME="BIB9">[9]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://www.vmware.com/">http://www.vmware.com/</A>, 
The VMWare PC virtualizer.

<DT><A NAME="BIB10">[10]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/">http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/</A>, 
The VirtualPC PC virtualizer.

<DT><A NAME="BIB11">[11]</A>
<DD>
<A HREF="http://www.twoostwo.org/">http://www.twoostwo.org/</A>, 
The TwoOStwo PC virtualizer.

</DL>



<H1><A NAME="SEC25" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC25">3. Regression Tests</A></H1>

<P>
In the directory <TT>`tests/'</TT>, various interesting testing programs
are available. There are used for regression testing.




<H2><A NAME="SEC26" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC26">3.1 <TT>`test-i386'</TT></A></H2>

<P>
This program executes most of the 16 bit and 32 bit x86 instructions and
generates a text output. It can be compared with the output obtained with
a real CPU or another emulator. The target <CODE>make test</CODE> runs this
program and a <CODE>diff</CODE> on the generated output.


<P>
The Linux system call <CODE>modify_ldt()</CODE> is used to create x86 selectors
to test some 16 bit addressing and 32 bit with segmentation cases.


<P>
The Linux system call <CODE>vm86()</CODE> is used to test vm86 emulation.


<P>
Various exceptions are raised to test most of the x86 user space
exception reporting.




<H2><A NAME="SEC27" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC27">3.2 <TT>`linux-test'</TT></A></H2>

<P>
This program tests various Linux system calls. It is used to verify
that the system call parameters are correctly converted between target
and host CPUs.




<H2><A NAME="SEC28" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC28">3.3 <TT>`qruncom.c'</TT></A></H2>

<P>
Example of usage of <CODE>libqemu</CODE> to emulate a user mode i386 CPU.




<H1><A NAME="SEC29" HREF="qemu-tech.html#TOC29">4. Index</A></H1>
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