Preliminary support for running 32-bit Linux binaries

[Tim Robbins]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 11:50:36AM -0400, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
> 
> Tim Robbins writes:
>  > I'm pleased to announce that my work on running 32-bit Linux binaries
>  > on FreeBSD/amd64 has come to the point where it runs almost everything I
>  > throw at it, including the Sun JDK, OpenOffice.org and Acrobat Reader.
> 
> Awesome!  I was sort of half planning to do this myself if nobody else
> stepped up, but I was waiting for module support.  Did you do this
> all monolithically?  Wow!  Anyway, I'm very happy that you did this.

It was done in Perforce over the course of 4-5 days in the tjr_linux branch.

> 
>  > The patch and some brief notes on installing the Linux base system and
>  > a few popular applications are available at:
>  > http://people.freebsd.org/~tjr/linux32.html
>  > 
> 
> I had a little trouble applying this patch, since the diff
> referred to new files as:
> ../src.vendor/sys/amd64/linux/linux.h  Thu Jan  1 10:00:00 1970
> rather than /dev/null.  This seemed to confuse my patch.
> 
> I needed to hand-edit the patch and replace these new file
> references with /dev/null instead in order to get the new
> files created.   I also made the sys/amd64/linux/ directory by hand.

Oops. I noticed this in the diff output, but assumed it knew what it was
doing. I'll see about generating a new patch.

> 
> Anyway, once I got the new files extracted, things went without
> a hitch.  Realplayer, OO, Acrobat, etc.  Nice job!
> 
>  > I'm aware of a number of problems with this patch -- I'm making it
>  > available in the current state for people to experiment with, and because
>  > I won't have time to tidy it up & commit it to CVS for at least 2 weeks.
> 
> Question -- do you plan to allow 32-bit and 64-bit linux modules
> to coexist?  I can see a need for 64-bit compat at some point...
> Especially if people want to run PGI compiled fortran or c programs.

Yes, although it would not currently be possible to include both in the
same kernel image due to symbol name clashes.


Tim