Date: Wed, 05 May 1999 21:49:04 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PCWeek article by Anne Chen -- Comments Message-ID: <199905060249.VAA32916@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> of "Wed, 05 May 1999 18:55:00 PDT." <38849.925955700@zippy.cdrom.com>
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"Jordan K. Hubbard" writes: > > So, your saying that FreeBSD can read in the binary and begin > > executing machine instructions without any processing in between, or > > Correct. It's still an x86 binary and everything in it that's not > trapping to the kernel for services is going to be executed exactly as > it is under Linux; its shared libraries will be loaded (out of some > part of /compat/linux/...), its accesses to many common system devices > (like the vga console) dealt with appropriately by compatibility > support in the driver, etc. As far as the binary's concerned, it's > running on a Linux box. When it makes a system call, that goes > through whatever syscall table has been mapped in with the process by > the image activator (the bit which handles getting /bin/ls into memory > so it can actually run) and if it's a Linux binary image activator, it > simply maps in a different syscall table than the FreeBSD ELF binary > image activator does. No extra overhead, just a switch pointing in > a different direction (so to speak). So rather than "Linux Emulation" would it not be better understood if we said, "FreeBSD supports the Linux ABI (Application Binary Interface)"? By writting to a common ABI (Win32) isn't that how Windows applications are supposed to run under Win95, Win98, and WinNT? And eventually isn't WINE supposed to do this too? In any case, the FreeBSD Linux emulation/ABI/whatever works pretty darn good. I've had better luck running i386 Linux binaries than i386 NetBSD. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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