Run any Linux application natively on Windows (Vista and 7) without Cygwin | Hacker News Reader

Run any Linux application natively on Windows (Vista and 7) without Cygwin

informationweek.com

14 pointsniktech13 comments

Run any Linux application natively on Windows

Sure except for anything that uses dbus, X, pam, framebuffer, sound, usb, /proc, CUPS etc. etc.

POSIX is a useful standard but it's a porting tool not a no effort port. Services for Unix Applications (SUA) will reduce the time it takes to get something up and running but only the most generic of applications will compile out of the box.

At work we developed a tool once to run Linux programs on Windows, but it took a different approach. Basically it was an application that you could point at a Linux binary. It would allocate memory in the application's space, load the Linux binary in that, and start running it. It would trap attempts by the Linux application to do system calls and service them.

This was in the early 2000s. Using it, I was able to take most of the RPMs from whatever desktop version of Red Hat was current then and load them onto a Windows system, and most of them worked (assuming I had a Windows X server available). Bash, vim, and most of the usual command line tools worked, as did things like GIMP, major GUI email and web clients, and the like.

We tried a couple approaches to dealing with case sensitive vs case insensitive file systems. One was to just ignore it--that actually turned out to work quite well. In a normal Red Had desktop install, I think I only ran into one thing that had trouble and it was easy to work around (the two conflicting files turned out to have the same contents, and were read-only).

I don't remember how fork was implemented.

We looked at making this into a product, but we never found a good niche for it. Then, reviewing code that we got from some contractors we had outsources to for some of the implementation, I found that they had copied some from the Linux kernel (they were supposed to just use it for a reference if they needed to figure out what something did). Since other parts of it were written under the assumption that it would NOT be a GPLed product, and had used commercial code not compatible with GPL, that pretty much killed the chance we'd ever revive the thing.

Sounds similar to 'Line'. From the wayback machine (current website seems to be gone):

http://web.archive.org/web/20021125163113/http://line.source...

Sourceforge project still exists: http://sourceforge.net/projects/line/

Article is from 2006. SFU was officially dropped by Microsoft circa 2009. Last version I could find doesn't even list Vista/7 as supported OSes. WTH?

SFU was replaced with SUA in Vista. SUA supports more of the POSIX standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

It's mentioned in the article: "Microsoft is transitioning the product line again, integrating it directly into Windows, with the Posix component being renamed to Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA)."

It's included in Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise editions, you can enable it from "Windows Features" dialog.

"Want to run best-of-breed apps under both Windows and Unix?" should be more like "want to run best-of-breed apps under a not so best-of-breed OS?"

Now, more seriously, faced with unsupported hardware I have to use, I think I would prefer to run a Linux virtual machine inside the Windows server and take time to get ready for the day when the server hardware is well supported and then migrate the VM to the bare hardware. It will take a performance hit, of course, but only a temporary one.

And, after that, it would look like a new hardware upgrade.

And, also, I bet it would be much less work.

One page - http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml...

Quite a misleading headline: SFU/SUA doesn't allow one to run native Linux binaries on Windows, which would require emulating Linux's syscall interface, libc, dynamic linker, etc. It allows one to port (i.e. recompile) POSIX-compliant applications. Linux (as the term is popularly used) is a significantly-larger superset of the interfaces and utilities specified by POSIX.

From what I read, you can get Debian and Gentoo system running with this.

http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Gentoo_on_WINDOWS

http://www.debian-interix.net/

Would love to try get Gentoo but MSDNAA offers Professional rather than Ultimate.

How is this different from Cygwin? Cygwin's software repositories are free so it seems superior, at least in that respect. Everything else the article describes sounds exactly like Cygwin.

This approach is higher performance, officially supported by Microsoft and comes with all Ultimate Vista/7 installations. Cygwin runs as a user-mode app that emulates the POSIX environment using the underlying Windows APIs. SUA is an integrated subsystem that is on the same level in the kernel stack as the Windows subsystem (that's being used by every Windows app out there). By being so close to the kernel, SUA is able to use undocumented APIs within the kernel to achieve greater performance than Cygwin.

As far as I'm aware, Interix (SUA) uses no undocumented interfaces. The kernel subsystem interfaces are actually quite nicely documented; I was working on a Darwin subsystem for a while, using SUA as a nice reference ("along with Windows Internals"), and it's really quite nice.

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