[illumos-Discuss] Fate of the lx brand?

[Joerg Schilling]

Matt Lewandowsky <matt at greenviolet.net> wrote:

>
> There's always been more interest in the community than effort when it comes to the lx brand. As Garrett said, it's extremely non-trivial to maintain, let alone enhance. Dragons have been sighted in the realm of lx.
>

If someone is really going to put effort into this piece of code, I would see 
it integrated in a different way as a final goal:

We are no longer forced to do political decisions like Sun did in the past.
So it would make sense to allow to use the lx brand not only in a dedicated zone 
but also anywhere else.

The basic idea for this module is a re-implementation of LKP (Linux Kernel 
Personality) from SCO. 

I did not boot UniXWare since 2 years, so let me explain from memory:

>From a UNIX process, you see a tree:

/linux/*

that contains a complete Linux installation.

>From a Linux process, you see a tree:

/unix/* 

that contains the complete UNIX installation.

If you try to exec() a new process with a PATH that begins with "/linux",
then the Linux compatibility is turned on. Any further process inherits an 
environment that grants Linux behavior even though the PATH does not begin
with "/linux" as the chroot() for Linux processes is inside "/linux".

Jörg

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