If the cisco 2500, 2600 and 3600 routers could be emulated in software and IOS run on them, complex networks could be built in software. It could be sold to cisco for exam purposes too.
I know of m68k emulators, what about MIPS R5000 emulators? The ethernet connections in these routers are based on AMD ethernet chips, emulatable?
Lastly, beside the MCU itself and connection to the RAM and flash, what else has to be emulated to successfully boot the IOS?
r u indian?
No. I'm not sure what that has to do with router emulation.
I believe Cisco already has this - i.e., ported IOS to a PC-based emulator with virtual interfaces that interact with other emulated devices. IIRC, they'd also licensed it to some training firms back in the dot-com days, and they were renting entire virtual racks of gear as a service to complement their training programs.
I'd think that to try and hack this yourself would be a long road, and the performance would be relatively poor. Far better to take the source code, write virtual interface drivers, and run it full-speed in a timeslice of a commodity PC. Of course, you first need the source code, which makes this a tough task for an outsider.
Try asking at snipped-for-privacy@cisco.com. They may have more info on where it's being used, etc.
I highly doubt we can lay our hands on IOS code, unless the stolen code that was circulating online for IOS 12.2 is complete and easily compilable. I'd still want to build a business plan on it, so cant use that.
Should be easier to take the 68k emulation code from motorolla, talk to the ucLinux group which ported Linux to the cisco 2500 router, open a router up and list all the interface chips connected to the 2500, and modify the 68k emulator to look like a 2500 to software. Compile the thing, optimised for speed, and run the binaries as a network on an Athlon64 3000+, should produce real-time emulation for several routers. I know selling such software to CCIE students will be trivial, the only problem being access to some real IOS.
So is adapting any complete m68k emulator to a 2500 emulator simple? Is adapting bochs or vmware for 286 (is there such a version?) or dosemu for 286, to a PIX 501 simple?
I know the m68k exists because 'kgens' emulates a sega genesis, which runs on a 68000 cpu, gives great performance on a pentium1. How hard is it to hack kgens to emulate a 2500?
Of course, therein lies the biggest obstacle, and the one I'd suggest needs to be addressed before delving into the technical design. Even if you are only supplying a platform for students to load IOS onto, they would be doing so illegally, as they wouldn't be licensed for it.
In the end, I suspect you would be stopped from selling your product, after spending a great amount of time perfecting it. If you do some searches on "Cisco" and "Huawei", you will find a tale of a major Chinese manufacturer of competing products that just happened to run Cisco IOS.
Wasnt there sometning called "routersim"
Do some google'ing for that ... , well i did it for you
Carsten
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