[illumos-Discuss] Fate of the lx brand?

[Gary]

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> lxrun was a user space application. It emulated Linux syscall behavior via a
> signal handler for SIGSYS (Bad syscall). lkp is implmented inside the kernel.
> It should be possible to use the lx brand code to implement something like lkp.

I think what's boggling about the concept in the first place -- and
perhaps why it didn't get much traction all around -- is that there
are probably not nearly as many closed source, proprietary Linux apps
as there are closed source, proprietary Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, Ultrix,
SCO, AIX, etc. apps. Which is why NetBSD has the binary emulation
layer that allows same hardware architecture binaries to run on the
same system that NetBSD has been installed on (q.v.
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/compat.html). But what OpenSolaris really
helped Solaris do was to grow its x86_64 hardware install base away
from the SPARC architecture in the way of kernel device drivers, etc.
But in this day and age of ubiquitous hypervisors and ample storage,
I'm seeing little reason to keep such compatibility layers alive
except for the most entrenched, slow moving bureaucratic orgs on the
planet. The only huge org I'm aware of that's keep old architecture
compatibility alive is the one that pioneered virtualizing in the
first place; IBM. So unless this project attracts that kind of man
hour backing, I'll have to pitch my vote with the others in suggesting
it would be nice but not at the expense of core functionality that
most current end users are hoping to continue to use.

-Gary