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FAT image creation (Emulation)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 18.02.2020, 03:39

> > As an aside, most newer cpus (2015+ ??) seems to have VT-X nowadays,
>
> Much earlier (like Sandy Bridge, which is afaik the 2011 generation),
> though Intel played games with that support, initially reserving that
> support for the more expensive (i7) series.
My Lenovo desktop (Core i5, dual core, quasi four with HTT) from 2011 has Nehalem Westmere (tail end of gen 1) with VT-X and nested page tables (unrestricted guest mode, unreal/big real, whatever). Trying to emulate anything on my 2009 Dell (Penryn?) dual-core laptop was like pulling teeth. (I vaguely recall shortening build time for p7zip under QEMU/FreeDOS from 11 hours to 5 just by avoiding LFNs. Yeah, I know, fairly pointless, but it's still a useful util, even if nobody cares about rebuilding in DOS like they should.) Now that BIOS/CSM is effectively dead (no more native booting), VT-X is very crucial (if you "need" legacy that badly).

This low-end Chromebook is only supported until (I think) June 2022. The battery will "probably" die before then. (My 2011 Lenovo Android tablet lasted six years with its battery before the *software* failed!) There are of course much more expensive Chromebooks (Pixelbook?). This one has Intel N3060, Braswell/Airmont, only dual core, only SSE 4.2, no AVX. (So, a shrunken Celeron 2016 cpu in a 2019 model Chromebook from 2013 cpu tech.) So not really worse than the older hardware I already have. It's impossible to fully know or appreciate these things without taking a leap of faith and buying one.

There's too many cpus. Zen was from early 2017. MS Surface has Zen+. Zen 2 was just released. Intel's on, what, gen 10 or 11?? It's too much. I did briefly online look at some Dell Ryzen laptops, but I really wanted a reasonable Linux one, not Windows.

> I cleaned out all Core2's early last year. So the oldest that I have now
> (except some Pentium-Ds) are Ivy Bridges. All have VT-X, since I looked out
> for that while buying :-)
You mentioned AVX2 on FASM's forum. I'm a bit underwhelmed there, but obviously all the math (Fortran?) nerds love it. I'm just not trendy or smart enough to care. Did you hear about AMD Threadripper 3 or whatever? 64 cores/128 threads! Phoronix did some tests vs. 2004 cpus, shows quite an increase!

I used to occasionally read the blog of the Darek Mihocka. He always kept up with various cpu releases, architectures, Bochs, emulators (including his own old Atari ones). He had a DOS one that he open-sourced years ago. So he was talking about various things like Haswell and other "modern" cpus. So that's what this reminds me of, even though I admit to not knowing or caring about literally every new tech release. I don't upgrade or purchase new stuff often, just mildly (morbidly??) curious.

I don't know what Delphi or FPC supports regarding multiple cores (a la OpenMP). And everything is ARM64 or x64 nowadays. One guy did write a C++11/17 book on multithreading, but I've not bothered learning C++ ('20 just finalized? ugh, "coming soon"). The world has barely caught up to '14/'17 yet. Even Delphi has too many versions (and books), so I worry about even pretending to care about that.

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