Linuxulator (was: Re: Benchmark (Phoronix): FreeBSD 9.0-RC2 vs. Oracle Linux 6.1 Server)

Hi,

you assume in your comment that development time "wasted" in the linuxulator is time lost for other development. This assumption could be valid for a commercially developed OS, but is wrong for FreeBSD. I tell this as a person who spend a lot of time with the linux ports, mentored a GSoC student who worked on the linuxulator and also put some time into the kernel parts.

The use case for it is: run linux programs which are not available with source or where "we" are not able to get it compiled on FreeBSD with a reasonable effort. As a data point, "we" managed in the past to take the closed source linux version of the Intel C/C++ compiler and manipulate it in a way to run in the linuxulator but produce FreeBSD binaries. I got reports that it was used in some HPC scenarios.

Wasn't it you who asked if there's a way to run CUDA on FreeBSD? Pessimistic but interested souls would not wait until there is maybe some result from open sourcing the nvidia compiler and instead either try to get something similar up and running, or to get a 64 bit version of the linuxulator. The later one may be more beneficial for more people, and may even more easy as the parts are open source and there's even some code somewhere in a VCS (maybe in perforce).

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Send via an Android device, please forgive brevity and typographic and spelling errors. 

"O. Hartmann" <ohartman_at_mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de> hat geschrieben:On 12/23/11 12:44, Alexander Best wrote:
[...]
>> Many suggested that the Linux binaries be run via the FreeBSD Linux 
>> emulation. Unchanged.
>> There is one problem here though, the emulation is still 32 bit.
> 
> plus the current emulation layer is far from complete. a lot of stuff hasn't
> been implemented yet (meaning it's missing or implemented as dummy code).
> 
> try running recent firefox linux binaries on freebsd. they will all crash
> almost instantly.
> 
> cheers.
> alex
> 

[...]

Sometimes I'm glad to have the Linuxulator, for instance using
Mathematica or an older 32bit IDL or even MATLAB. But lately, I run into
problems on more recent platforms like FreeBSD 9 and 10.

There maybe serious reasons having the Linuxulator, i do not know. But
if not, why spending rare developer resources on that? As far as I'm
concerned, the only real reason having the Linuxulator is some stuff
from Adobe for desktop systems, Flash. That's it.
For the scientific stuff, I try to move my people towards OpenSource,
since we do "standard" stuff and I expect students and scientists
solving problems without fancy coloured clicky funny things. In
"production", this might be another point of view. SciLab from INRIA is
great, MuPAD, MAXIMA also.


But is there a real need running the Linux binary of Forefox on FreeBSD?

Regards,
Oliver