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Java-Based x86 Emulator
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Mar 24, 2007 04:05 PM
from the DOS-you-say dept.
from the DOS-you-say dept.
jaavaaguru writes "Researchers at Oxford University have produced a Java-based x86 emulator that they hope will be useful in testing applications and learning about viruses without damaging the host, utilizing the robust sandboxing that Java provides. They have an online demo available that boots DOS and has some games to play. Being purely Java, this emulator should be able to run on almost anything, including cell phones." The code is not yet available outside the Oxford community; the developers are said to be working on a suitable general license. In the meantime the code can be licensed on a case-by-case basis.
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Interesting, but (Score:5, Funny)
Still, I'd love to tinker with this from a 'gee whiz' standpoint.
Re:Interesting, but (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's hard to get good emulation speed in C++, it's even harder in Java.
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can you run java in the x86? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like the old days when you ran windows real mode under a windows 386 mode windows.
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Re:can you run java in the x86? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:can you run java in the x86? (Score:5, Funny)
...written in XSLT.
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Re:can you run java in the x86? (Score:5, Funny)
The next step is to get rid of hardware altogether.
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It's turtles all the way down, I tell you!
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Btw, here's a Gameboy emulator [pscode.com] written in Visual Basic!
It's quite fast... puzzling.
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Re:Interesting, but (Score:5, Funny)
And with them it can perform almost as fast as C in some fringe cases.
Parent
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There is a world of difference between "theoretically capable" and "reliable does". Is there some practical demonstration that compute-intensive tasks like emulation can be reliably executed with Java without sucking?
Re:Interesting, but (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Interesting, but (Score:4, Insightful)
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errm ... how about because the applet failed to load?
If you go to the site, you'll see their premise is stupid - that game companies will license this to sell old dos games on cell phones, rather than porting them. Of course what they overloook is once you have the emulator, you don't need the game companies - just go through any abandonware site, or your stacks of old floppies.
Did you try it? (Score:2)
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Molasses - 35mph! (Score:3, Interesting)
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You know what would really be kewl? If you could make an integrated circuit that runs java real fast then you would have a chip that runs x86 assembly.
How's the efficiency? (Score:2, Interesting)
On, say, a mobile phone (which is mentioned by the site as a possible use) would there be enough processing grunt to do anything useful? I know Java's not as slow as some people wou
Well for one (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like you to point me to the support page for VMWare on SPARC... oh wait that's cause there isn't one. QEMU can't even run most applications on a SPARC.
And forget about ARM.
I think this is great. Java is not as slow as people seem to think it is. One thing Java 5 (and 6) have that actually benefits virtualization is dynamic recompilation... the JVM knows the instruction sdequences better than the original author, and in theory can optimize the code paths in ways writing a virtualizer in assembly or C++ can not.
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It's fine for all sorts of things while running, but the two apps I use it for aren't exactly impressive.
If I leave Azureus up for a while, it's eating 400 megs of memory. It also takes 10+ seconds to show
its window. The other thing I regularly use Java for is my bank, which insists on using a friggin'
control in its window. It takes about a minute to show up, even with other Java apps running. It seems
the s
Re:Well for one (Score:5, Informative)
Under the Java control applet, under the General tab, click "Settings..." under "Temporary Internet Files". Then click "View Applets...". It will take a moment to load (or in my case, 2-3 minutes). Then UNcheck "Enable Caching". Firefox now starts my applets almost instantly. This doesn't affect downloaded Java applications such as Azureus or Eclipse (both of which I use extensively).
Hope this helps.
Parent
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And this wouldn't be just limited to a virus program either. Suppose we had this a
Re:How's the efficiency? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's great, but you can already do that with VMware, Parallels, QEMU, or other virtualization tools. Sure, virtualization requires the same host and guest architecture, but we all have plenty of x86 machines sitting around, and near-native speeds are necessary to actually boot Windows Vista before the sun goes supernova. So while this is neat software, it's not as suitable for malware researchers as what they are already using. The JPC project needs to find a different niche.
Parent
Re:How's the efficiency? (Score:4, Informative)
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Java x86 emulator speed (Score:5, Funny)
Java+DOS: Snail with ball and chain
Java+DOS on non x86: Snail nailed to the table
Java isn't really slow... (Score:2)
So it runs DOS eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Why did they use Java? It would have been faster in C++.
I for one welcome our new old x86 overlords.
Did I miss any?
Re:So it runs DOS eh? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
java me is not java se (Score:2)
But still cool though.
What do you do when it crashes? (Score:3, Insightful)
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on a good Java runtime... (Score:2, Insightful)
Other projects doing the same/faster thing.. (Score:3, Informative)
http://binarytranslator.org/ [binarytranslator.org]
There are attempts to integrate this into the JNode open source Java OS to make a JNode/GNU stack.
There is also the VEELS/JXEmu system:
http://nil.ics.uci.edu/~gal/?page=VEELS [uci.edu]
which appears not to be publicly available.
My intepretation (Score:5, Funny)
For an encore, perhaps they can write a JVM in BASIC.
WARNING: Performance implosion imminent due to recursive interpretation.
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That's the huge advantage of java. Just port the 100 meg or so of JVM, throw in a faster processor and a few more gigs of memory, and it'll run on anything.
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Flamebait?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey mod, I'm serious and I'm making a serious point.
Porting the JVM somewhere is about as much effort as porting a word processor, or any other 100 meg application. But if you port the JVM, all the applications you have in Java are ported by proxy. It's a one-time task.
So if your 100 meg word processor is in Java, once you port the JVM you get the word processor for free. And all of your other Java applications. You don't have to port them seperately. It's one porting task and then you're done.
An
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Although I would smile if they installed W
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If this webapp. survives a lot of geeks messing and hacking about in that virtual machine I'd be very tempted to label this as a very interesting experience when it comes to the Java robustness factor.
There's no danger to the virtual machine. The emulator and disc images are all run within the browser. So each browser receives its own emulated memory space and fresh disc images. No processing occurs on the server (except for serving the application code and disc images to the browser).
Compared to what? (Score:3, Insightful)
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