Christoph Hellwig (Germany)

Linux-ABI: Support for Non-native Applications

The Linux-ABI project is a modification to the Linux 2.4 kernel that allows Linux to support binaries compiled for non-Linux operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or Sun Solaris.

Building upon the kernel's basic infrastructure to support multiple execution domains with different system call tables, signal and error numbers Linux-ABI provides a rich set of functionality that allows Linux to intercept foreign system calls. For some trivial syscalls the equivalent Linux call can be used directly after fixing up the calling conventions. Others only need flag remapping, but most of the code in Linux-ABI is used to handle the complex cases of functionality not implemented in Linux (e.g. STREAMS) or behaving very differently like many of the I/O controls (ioctls). In addition Linux-ABI provides remapping of filenames to shadow trees for allowing non-native binaries to find foreign support files instead of their native counterparts.