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

[Mindaugas Rasiukevicius <rmind%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> wrote:
> 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:
> 

You have missed Mach (as independent from Darwin), which is a lot of code
and a maintenance headache.  Most of these compat emulations are dusting
unmaintained and have problems, e.g. in some I have seen complete lack of
locking and some with errors triggered just by invoking that syscall (no
reports of such cases suggest a lack of users).

Given such reality, I think main focus should be on Linux emulation, and
most of others should be retired.  Particularly - Mach, Darwin and IRIX.
Also, I would say retire FreeBSD emulation, since Linux emulation covers
it by nearly always having its alternative these day, and modern FreeBSD
is a moving target.  Keeping Ultrix, on the other hand, should not hurt.

It might be reasonable to support SVR4 or modern Solaris, if there are
potential users with their proprietary binaries, but that requires both
interest and maintainer.  Is there any?

-- 
Mindaugas