[Info-vax] Baremetal emulators, was: Re: Alpha emulator for OSX

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-02-10 01:53:46 +0000, Chris Scheers said:

> It's not necessary for a "near bare metal" OS beneath an emulation to 
> even have a stack to maintain.  There are many advantages to not having 
> one.
> 
> Done correctly, the underlying OS is just used as a hardware 
> abstraction layer.  It does not need a network stack.  It just needs a 
> way, e.g., PCAP, to allow the emulation access to the network card.  
> Then all packets on the wire actually go to/from the emulation and 
> never touch the underlying OS.

It'd be unusual to not expose at least a management and monitoring 
interface and some sort of a software maintenance and upgrade path into 
the emulator layer, and you're going to have to expose a console path 
for anything of practical use; unless you're going to restrict the 
guest to the serial ports or what the guest can manage.   Then there's 
that the emulator marketeers are not going to like competing with 
serial lines against an emulator that is network-managed and 
network-upgradable.  Could somebody do a completely isolated emulator?  
Sure.   Their own marketing would kill them, just as soon as some other 
emulator broke from that model.


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