Hacker News Reader

Comment by justincormack | Hacker News Reader

Emulations have been a Unix feature for a long time actually. NetBSD has had 64 bit Linux emulation for ages, for example, but its not very complete because no one has cared enough to implement more. For example Illumos is AFAIK the first system to emulate epoll. The Linux API is huge and historically the process has been just fixing stuff for a binary someone wants to run. It is very tedious work...

I dont really see it as zones in linux. More a gateway drug for non-Linux.

View on HN

Hey Justin -- do you have insight into how hard any particular remapping (ie: epoll) is to perform ? I was talking to @bcantrill about their effort at a Docker meetup and mentioned the NetBSD emulation (he said "Oh! Of course!"), but whats interesting (in retrospect) is that they (Joyent) just tried running stuff and played whack-a-mole w/ unimplemented APIs... how tough would it be for "us" (NetBSD) to occasionally implement pieces ?

edit: parens

Speaking without familiarity with NetBSD, I think it depends on what kernel facilities the system happens to have; speaking for SmartOS/illumos, in many cases we were able to slightly rephrase Linux facilities as extant facilities -- saving a considerable amount of time and effort. For example, the big realization with epoll was just how naive it is -- so much so, in fact, that it actually looks very similar to a pre-port mechanism (/dev/poll) that we developed nearly 20 years ago (!!) and later deprecated in favor of ports. epoll would have been much nastier without /dev/poll -- which is likely the greatest service that /dev/poll has ever provided anyone...

Yes, NetBSD added some facilities (and general missing functions) that were Linux-like if that made sense. No one did epoll as kqueue is a bit of a mismatch and we never had /dev/poll...

A lot of the issue is just testing - NetBSD does not have any in tree tests for compat. I have some out of tree, which help a lot.

Hi Bryan -- I'm also aware that epoll may have been a bad example on my part, because isn't it subject to some nasty fork/share bugs wrt handling the (well) handle, and what file it's actually associated with the handle -- so a parent can get notifications on a handle it doesn't have, or worse, notifications for a socket that it does have that is not really the same handle that's issuing the event.

In cases like that, did you end up trying to be bug-compatible, or make a design decision to clear up the trouble ?

[edit -- spell "Bryan" correctly]

Funny you should mention that one in particular -- from our (SmartOS's) epoll(5) man page:

       While  a  best effort has been made to mimic the Linux semantics, there
       are some semantics that are too  peculiar  or  ill-conceived  to  merit
       accommodation.   In  particular,  the  Linux  epoll facility will -- by
       design -- continue to  generate  events  for  closed  file  descriptors
       where/when  the underlying file description remains open.  For example,
       if one were to fork(2) and subsequently close an actively epoll'd  file
       descriptor  in  the  parent,  any  events generated in the child on the
       implicitly duplicated file descriptor will continue to be delivered  to
       the parent -- despite the fact that the parent itself no longer has any
       notion of the file description!  This epoll facility refuses  to  honor
       these  semantics;  closing  the  EPOLL_CTL_ADD'd  file  descriptor will
       always result in no further  events  being  generated  for  that  event
       description.

So while we do aspire to be bug-compatible, we're not about to compromise our principles over it. More details (or some of them, anyway) can be found in the talk on LX-branded zones that I gave at illumos Day at Surge 2014.[1][2]

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs

It is just tedious and you need motivation. Especially as Linux has a lot of interfaces, many of which are frustratingly annoying - there are three file change notification interfaces, of different dates. In fact there are at least two of everything!

I amagine much of the Joyent code could be easily ported to NetBSD/FreeBSD (which now has a 64 bit interface as of a few months back). epoll may well be the most difficult (it has edge and level triggered events and other annoyances). But a not very performant version should be doable.

Mostly, few people have been interested. I have a decent test suite though (rump based) so email if you are interested...

Agreed. The application is what matters... in the end most people don't care about what Operating System their apps run on.

I've felt for a long time that with the right tooling, smartOS/Illumos would make an ideal Container OS. Glad to see that they're moving hard in this direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com