# MIPS emulator for FreeBSD?



## saxon3049 (Apr 24, 2010)

I have been mucking about with low power processors for a while now but they have always been X86 based (AMD Geode / Intel Atom) but now I have a hankering to mess around with a MIPS processor and can get my hands on some embedded hardware. But before I spend much money on the hardware I would like to try programming in emulator first. 

I would like it to run on FreeBSD and / or OSX, if you could point me in the way of a suitable emulator I would greatly appreciate it, also I am looking for your tips and hints about MIPS processors in regards to longevity of the platform and how hard it is to port code over to this platform both in Ruby and C / C++.

This is my first serious attempt at another platform other than X86 and X64 so please be gentile. :stud


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## cajunman4life (Apr 25, 2010)

Qemu has a MIPS emulation mode.

http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html

As for the platform, can't help you there. I'm intel/sparc only.


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## saxon3049 (Apr 25, 2010)

Thanks for that, it might just be my quick gloss over of the discription but it comes off like it is a plug in for xen.


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## cajunman4life (Apr 25, 2010)

Nope, qemu and xen are two separate technologies.


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## sossego (Apr 25, 2010)

http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/ Sub directories in there.
Look through them.


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## mmoll (Apr 25, 2010)

GXemul (emulators/gxemul) is also worth a look: http://gxemul.sourceforge.net/


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## eyebone (Apr 25, 2010)

qemu is almost everything u need for different architectures  i am always impressed how much is supported already. for mips:

```
qemu-system-mips     qemu-system-mips64el 
qemu-system-mips64   qemu-system-mipsel
```

and some more:

```
qemu-system-arm        qemu-system-mips64el   qemu-system-sh4eb
qemu-system-cris       qemu-system-mipsel     qemu-system-sparc
qemu-system-m68k       qemu-system-ppc        qemu-system-sparc64
qemu-system-microblaze qemu-system-ppc64      qemu-system-x86_64
qemu-system-mips       qemu-system-ppcemb     
qemu-system-mips64     qemu-system-sh4
```


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