Syborg

I promised more about hardware virtualisation for the Symbian platform.  Here’s another serving.

The open source QEMU processor emulator brings us the capability to create ARM virtual machines and run them on Intel x86 PCs. Then, if we install Symbian on a QEMU VM, we’ve got a virtual, PC hosted Symbian environment for development and testing that is superior to the venerable Symbian Emulator from every perspective. We are running with this. Soon, Symbian kits will contain a QEMU VM ROM image as well as well as the Symbian Emulator. It will take time for us to bring the features of the QEMU image up to parity with the Emulator, but the Emulator’s days are numbered.

We don’t get “Symbian on QEMU” for nothing, however. QEMU let’s us create ARM VMs for PC hosts. But we’ve still got to make Symbian run on these QEMU VMs, and that problem is the same one we face in getting Symbian to run on any novel type of device. The fact that the QEMU device is virtual  rather than physical makes no difference.

Getting Symbian to run on any novel type of device is a matter of creating a Symbian baseport for that type of device. “Baseport”, in Symbian jargon, means a port of the Symbian base for a specfic device type, where the Symbian base means the kernel and hardware services. With the right baseport underneath, the higher layers of the platform don’t care what the device is like.

Creating a baseport for QEMU ARM devices was the bit of real boffinry in the way of getting Symbian on QEMU. It has been done primarily by Martin Trojer. His baseport is called Syborg, and you can get it now from the Symbian source repo at https://developer.symbian.org/oss/FCL/sf/adaptation/qemu/. We have a Wiki page up about Syborg & QEMU, and you can follow the very active discussion round Syborg on our Tools forum.

Martin’s repo doesn’t just provide the Syborg baseport. It also contains a source fork of QEMU itself, which builds in conventional GNU autotools style: ./configure, make, make install. This fork enhances the offcial QEMU distribution with the flexibility to specify a VM’s peripherals via Python plugins and thus to load a VM definition into QEMU dynamically, rather than having to compile the specification of each available VM into a build of QEMU. Let’s hope Python plugin support is accepted into the official QEMU mainline.

There’s one great plus for QEMU v. the Symbian Emulator I haven’t mentioned yet. Unlike the Emulator,  QEMU runs on Linux as well as Windows. That means that if we can build the Syborg baseport on Linux, and build Syborg ROMs on Linux too,  we’ll  have a Linux hosted virtual Symbian environment and remove the fundamental obstacle that has always stood in the path of Symbian development on Linux.

Both of the remaining prerequisites for that breakthrough – building Syborg on Linux and building Syborg ROMs on Linux – are problems  I have attacked in the weeks since Martin Trojer’s contribution went in – and I’ve hacked through solutions for both them on Ubuntu Linux. Here’s a screenshot of the Symbian text shell running in a QEMU window on my Ubuntu laptop.

I have posted some HowTos on the Symbian Tools forum that describe these hack solutions, but they’re already out of date so I won’t give links. I’m going to move the record of my Syborg on Linux recipes onto the Symbian Developer Wiki in the next few days and keep them refreshed there. Expect more Syborg blogs here as I make progress.