| gabriel rosenkoetter on Thu, 11 Apr 2002 01:54:54 -0400 |
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On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 12:56:44AM -0400, kevin mudrick wrote: > NetBSD has some sort of compatibility layer to allow native linux apps to > run on it? Neat! Are you going to talk about this at your presentation? > Or am I mistaken here? You're not misunderstanding, and I'll be glad to talk about it next Thursday. (Any other requests? Haven't written up my notes yet...) As of some 2.2 Linux kernel, NetBSD/i386 emulation of Linux apps had them running faster than Linux (all we do is emulate the syscalls, it's pretty simple, conceptually). Don't know whether that's still true (or whether it was ever more than negligible). Incidentally, Linux isn't the only binary file format for which the i386 port of NetBSD has binary emulation. This is better referred to as binary compatibility, really (since it's not like the binaries are running under any kind of virtual machine, just that the syscalls are emulated). NetBSD's ld actually handles all binaries as a COMPAT function in the kernel (including NetBSD ELF binaries, which are what we install by default on most ports these days). Here's the list straight from the i386 GENERIC kernel config (comment characters mean exactly what you think they do): options COMPAT_NOMID # compatibility with 386BSD, BSDI, NetBSD 0.8, options COMPAT_09 # NetBSD 0.9, options COMPAT_10 # NetBSD 1.0, options COMPAT_11 # NetBSD 1.1, options COMPAT_12 # NetBSD 1.2, options COMPAT_13 # NetBSD 1.3, options COMPAT_14 # NetBSD 1.4, options COMPAT_15 # NetBSD 1.5, options COMPAT_43 # and 4.3BSD options COMPAT_SVR4 # binary compatibility with SVR4 options COMPAT_IBCS2 # binary compatibility with SCO and ISC options COMPAT_LINUX # binary compatibility with Linux options COMPAT_FREEBSD # binary compatibility with FreeBSD #options COMPAT_MACH # binary compatibility with Mach binaries #options COMPAT_PECOFF # kernel support to run Win32 apps The MACH and PECOFF stuff may not work perfectly without a little haggling. (WINE on NetBSD makes use of COMPAT_PECOFF, last I checked, and it only works about as well as WINE does anywhere.) Note that the list on other ports is significantly shorter... macppc only has Linux compatibility, and it was imperfect last time I tried; sparc has SunOS 4.x and SunOS 5.x (Solaris); sparc64 (UltraSparc processors) has 32-bit (but not 64-bit) SunOS 5.x. (We lack 64-bit Solaris compatibility because it's actually pretty hard to come by 64-bit binaries for Solaris. gcc can't make them, and only a couple of the binaries Sun ships are actually 64-bit. Things like Oracle 9i are... but they're kind of expensive and rather complex to use to test syscall emulation.) Not sure if ports like next68k have any at all (though it'd be pretty cool if it did, since NeXTStep's Display PostScript stuff really rocks). Getting, perhaps, ahead of myself here... -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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