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Date:      Wed, 26 Aug 1998 03:59:59 +0930 (CST)
From:      Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   ANNOUNCEMENT: SysVR4 binary compatibility for FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <199808251829.DAA02646@atdot.dotat.org>

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I am pleased to announce the availability of an ALPHA release of an
LKM which implements SysVR4 emulation under FreeBSD.

The LKM currently emulates a couple of hundred System-V syscalls,
which allows it to run many shell-based utilities from a Solaris 2.5.1
CD-ROM I have on my development machine.  Basic SysV network services
are emulated to the point where programs like "telnet" and "ftp" work,
although X11 clients and programs which use UDP currently fail.  The
emulator needs some work before it's ready for mainstream, but I
believe most of the grunt work has been done.

It has been produced mainly by porting the NetBSD COMPAT_SVR4 stuff
from a NetBSD-current system I have here.  Some parts of it have also
been ripped out of the iBCS2 and Linux emulators already contained 
within FreeBSD.  I send sincere thanks to Soren and DavidG for the work
they put into those emulators.  Special mention must also be made 
for Christos Zoulas from the NetBSD core team, who is responsible
for most of the NetBSD code I "borrowed."

As far as I can tell, it does most of the things an appropriately 
configured NetBSD system does (and, unfortunately, many of the things
it doesn't:  UDP is broken, as mentioned above).  I'm especially
interested in co-opting developers who can fill in some of the gaps
that the NetBSD folks left as no-ops -- see the README provided
with the distribution for more info.

I'm currently soliciting developers who are interested in refining
it, especially people with knowledge of SysVR4 STREAMS networking
(for refining the STREAMS emulation provided by this LKM) and low-
level machine context handling (for setcontext() and getcontext()
system calls, both of which are currently noops in my emulator).

The emulator can be obtained from ftp://slash.dotat.org/pub/freebsd-svr4/.
There's a README file there which says what you need and more READMEs
in the distribution which say how to install it.  If I've left anything
out of those, please let me know!  The distributions are covered by
the Berkeley license, so feel free to distribute far and wide if it
takes your fancy.

Note that you'll need access to a real SysVR4 machine (Solaris/x86,
SCO OpenServer, UnixSwear, whatever) to get the shared libraries if
you expect to be able to use this for anything serious.  I can't 
provide that stuff in the distribution for obvious reasons.

I've set up a majordomo list for further discussion of the emulator.
Send email to majordomo@atdot.dotat.org with the text
"subscribe freebsd-svr4" in the BODY of the message to subscribe.

If you have any questions, queries or comments, please send them
either to me <newton@atdot.dotat.org> or the mailing list
<freebsd-svr4@atdot.dotat.org>.  I especially want to know if I've
left anything out of the distributions, or if people simply can't
get it to work at all.

It's 4:00 in the morning -- I'm going to bed.  :-)

Regards,

    - mark

--------------------------------------------------------------------
I tried an internal modem,                    newton@atdot.dotat.org
     but it hurt when I walked.                          Mark Newton
----- Voice: +61-4-1958-3414 ------------- Fax: +61-8-83034403 -----

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