Running Pandora VM on Windows?


Kelvin

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I've gone through, like, 20 pages on Google, and every relevant page has been about running a Windows VM on Pandora, and not the other way around. I've downloaded the image of the Pandora OS, and I wanted to work on porting some stuff to it on my own PC, since my Pandora's still broken (parts were shipped, just waiting for them). When I look for Qemu on Windows, I just get running Windows with Qemu. If anyone's got a Pandora VM working on Windows, could you give me some info on it?
 
The big problem with this is, that you will not have access to all the hardwarefeatures like GLES accelertion, DSP, Hardwarebuttons and Joysticks, SDL HW scaling etc.

Those are the things that make the Pandora different than any other Linux distro.
 
A VM virtualizes, i.e. it uses the host's CPU natively. As long as we're not talking about Windows RT, it is plain impossible - you need an ARM CPU (with hardware virtualization support), and AMD's x86/ARM hybrid SoCs are still only a mark on their roadmap. You have to use an emulator like Qemu.

No VMware, no Virtualbox, no Hyper-V.
 
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As the others have said, your ONLY option is QEMU... You can run it inside of Windows, or Linux, heck, you can even run it on any architecture that can compile QEMU and has support. 

In windows you'll have to have the QEMU Arm executable, then create an image (Even if you have the OS), then you will need to mount both at the same time, as the OS image, will then be installed onto the created "Disk" image. The main thing you might run into (Im not 100% on this), but having done the above on other ARM and PPC devices, you *Might* need to either compile the kernel or download it, or else find some kind of Bootloader that will load the OS img payload. Like I said, I've never done it with QEMU for the Pandora's OS, but i'd imagine it's pretty similar. 

Lastly, Assuming you manage to get the ball rolling, another problem you'll have is there is no real way to emulate the Pandora physically, as I don't believe there is any way to setup the appropriate Virtual Hardware. SO, most likely, all if not, most of the software simply wont run if it requires certain library's those parts need. For example, games would need to call the OpenGL library used by the SGX VGA. Which, Would not be present, which would stop you in your tracks.

Is it possible? Absolutley, but would it really work well? I think it depends on the software. 

If you managed to get all of the above sorted out, you're going to have absolutely TERRIBLE performance. The overhead emulating all of that hardware would be many times more than the hardware itself (Im taking P*10^x here) where "P" is the original MIPS equivalent. In reality, you probably would never be capable of 100% even 70% on a Xeon E5 type workstation. 

Long story short, just buy a Pandora. Even the First Batch would be theoretically more efficient, assuming your time has any worth lol.
 
I had a Pandora, but it's wrecked beyond repair, sadly. I could buy the parts to build a new one for about half the price of a pre-assembled one, maybe a bit more, but the reason I wanna emulate the OS is because I don't have that money yet, and I wanna continue developing for Pandora until I can get a new one. At the very least, I hear Pandora executables will run on Pyra, and just the PND format is changing, so I can still do that.
 
At the very least, I hear Pandora executables will run on Pyra, and just the PND format is changing, so I can still do that.
Actually out of the box they most likely won't, due to differences in libraries (pandora uses armel, Pyra will use armhf).
EDIT: However, the core group of porters will likely migrate their work over to the Pyra right off the bat. Plus software can be made now on the Pandora if they use Pandian Mark3 or the current Pyra OS as those are based on Debian jessie and use armhf libraries.
 
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