Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Windows7 running on Powermac G5 (experimental) - part4

Recently, Lubuntu powerpc becomes stable and QEMU also becomes more stable and compatible.
I found the report of windows7 running on qemu / macport of OSX but it was reported to be still slow compared with VirtualPC for Mac 7.02
Then, I tried to run windows7 on QEMU2.0 / Lubuntu 14.04,1.

First, install qemu
           apt-get install qemu
    for sound emulation
           apt-get install pulseaudio

Second, I converted the previous disk image file installed windows7 starter (VPC for Mac 7) to qcow2 file.

           qemu-img convert -f vpc -O qcow2 diskimage.vhd diskimage.qcow2

QEMU for PPC-linux can simulate at most 2047 MB RAM while VPC7 can do max. 512MB.  QEMU can also be simulated multi-processor or -core, however windows7 starter supports only uniprocessor.
For sound emulation, "-soundhw ac97" option is needed and the driver must be installed manually (link).

          qemu-system-i386 -m 2047 -smp 2,cores=2,sockets=1,threads=1 -localtime -vga std -soundhw ac97 -hda diskimage.qcow2


Unfortunately, Windows7 on QEMU/Linux was slow as same as on VPC7 with ramdisk.
Sounds also work ....but with severe delay.

On my several trials, a little speed-up could be observed when a disk image file was on high-speed USB drive (I used SANDISK EXTREME) than on the internal SATA HDD.
Other faster devices (SSD or RAM disk) may show better perfomance.  I hope for the future updates, for expamle more RAM could be assign.

No comments:

Post a Comment