Dennis writes:
>The main emulation scheme that might work on linux, would be to rewrite the
>whole intrinsic layer including image, natively on linux.  This gives a
>mpe-api directly for new applications, and with an emulation layer, user
>binaries, and many other user space subsystems would work.  Luckily the
>intrinsic layer is relatively small and well defined. And by replacing the
>intrinsic the emulater does not have to deal at all with real io so there
is
>no emulation of current hardware interfaces, just user space stuff, and
>shared library access stuff.

I was reading the slides that Wirt mentioned earlier about the HP-UX
emulation for Itanium at:

http://www.intel.com/design/itanium/tranhp/sld001.htm

One of the slides mentions the importance of the object loader.  This is the
software that is responsible for resolving run-time libraries and executing
objects.  If I am correct, and I am sure to be corrected if not, you can do
some clever things in this area.  It would be possible to rewrite libraries
one at a time so the emulator actually calls native routines instead of the
emulated ones.  One can incrementally improve the speed of the emulation as
each library is converted to a native format.  You will still need the shell
to give you file equations, JCW's, system vars, etc. but I think this line
of thinking is looking more and more promising as a long term solution (>
2006).

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