Lxrun development

Current areas of development in lxrun

Since lxrun is fairly robust now, implementation of new system calls has slowed down quite a bit. However, there are lots of other aspects of lxrun that need work. If you'd like to help with any of the following efforts, contact the people involved or E-Mail steven@ugcs.caltech.edu.

March 1998: Incorporating SCO and SUN changes

SCO has done some work on lxrun to support UnixWare 7 and Sun has done the same for Solaris7 x86. Current effort is to merge these changes back into the current release (0.9.1pre3) and release a new version (probably 0.9.3since the SCO release for UnixWare7 was numbered 0.9.2sco1)

• ld-linux.so port to OSR5/UW2/UW7 -- By making a native ld-linux.so, there would no longer be a need to execute lxrun explicitly -- the user could just run the Linux(R) app as if it were a native app. This is important to the seamless integration of Linux apps into the SCO environments.
  This has been completed for the Solaris and UnixWare7 platforms (ELF binaries only)
  Steve Ginzburg)
• installation of lxrun -- Right now it's a major pain to install lxrun. Various files have to be downloaded and installed in various places. This process needs to be automated.
  This is still a concern - currently its being addressed by distributing a comprehensive set of linux libs and files to make a linux runtime environment and providing Installation Notes for application (suites) that require more than copying a binary into place. This is necessary but insufficient
  (Ron Record)
• Solaris x86 port & autoconf support -- Since the purpose of lxrun is to promote the free exchange of software between systems, the more systems on which it runs, the better. Andrew Gallatin successfully ported lxrun v0.8.6 to Solaris. Work is currently under way to re-port the current version of lxrun to Solaris, and also to make lxrun's adaptation to the host system more robust using GNU autoconf.
  Support for the Solaris version is continuing at Sun We've backed off on supporting autoconf given the small number off platforms we're currently suporting
  (James Macnicol)
• shared memory X11 -- Currently, all X applications that run under lxrun do so via TCP/ip. This is because the shared memory scheme that Linux uses for local communication between X apps and the X server is incompatible with SCO's X servers. If we could devise a way to bridge this gap, performance on lxrunned X apps would improve dramatically.