Re: Status and future of 3rd party ABI compatibility layer

[eric%cirr.com@localhost (Eric Schnoebelen)]

Joerg Sonnenberger writes:
- Hi all,
- there is a lot of code in sys/compat and changes in the kernel API tend
- to require changes in this code too. I would like to know which
- emulations are actually in use, what the status of emulation is (both in
- terms of stability and feature set) and based on that, whether some of
- them shouldn't rest in the Attic.
- 
- As far as I can tell we have emulation code for:
- 
- FreeBSD (does it even handle FreeBSD 4?)

No, it doesn't work for FreeBSD 4.x (at least the last time I
tried a year or two ago, I haven't seen anything that would
imply that has changed.)

- Linux
- OSF1
- SunOS/Solaris
- SVR3
- SVR4
- Ultrix
- 
- Windows/PECOFF (hasn't this been considered dead quite a while ago?)

I thought this was recently removed from the tree.

- I don't think we need to discuss keeping Linux. I also don't count NDIS
- or NetBSD32 in this area. For the rest, I would find the following
- information highly useful to evaluate the maintainance cost and ensure
- future support:
- 
- (1) Can the emulation run real world application and which? 

OSF1 emulation has been used to run real-world applications.

- (3) How can this emulation be tested? Where can reference binaries be
- obtained? Has someone done the work to integrate them with ATF or other
- scripted test frame works?

Sadly, the only freely available OSF1 applications are the old
netscape navigator suite (which is were I glommed the shared
libraries for use in emul/osf1-lib.)

- (4) Is the emulation in use?

I'm not presently using it.

--
Eric Schnoebelen                eric%cirr.com@localhost         
http://www.cirr.com
  Systems programmer:  A person in sandals who has been in the elevator
    with the senior vice president and is ultimately responsible for
            a phone call you are to receive from your boss.