Other *NIX apps

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: 16 Apr 2003 13:08:15 EDT
"Kenneth E. Lussier" said:

>Hi All,
>
>I know that all *NIX versions (Solaris, HPUX, Linux, etc.) have their
>own little nuances, but deep down (and in some cases, really, *REALLY*
>deep down) they are supposedly all the same. This makes me wonder: Is it
>possible to run an old Solaris-based program on a Linux system? Just how
>interoperable are all of these different *NIX system? Just some fodder
>for discussion....

Well, it gets way more "deep down" than just the OS.  For example, 
most Linux systems are i386 based, whereas SunOS, typically ran on 
Motorola chips, and later, Sparc chips.  Solaris runs on Sparc and 
UltraSparc, True64 runs on Alpha, etc.

So, while the OSes may appear similar from the "look'n'feel" 
perspective, the underlying hardware is drastically different between 
all these systems, making it next to impossible to run a binary 
compiled for one architecture on another.

That being said, there have been attempts to "fake" the binary out, 
and/or convert to a "native" binary.  DEC had a lot of success with 
this when Sun abandoned SunOS in favor Solaris, and they freely 
distributed a program which would run and convert your native SunOS 
binaries to Digital UNIX on Alpha (most of the time they even ran 
faster than than the native Sun binary on Sun hw did :)

If your app is not tied to a specific hardware architecture, and has 
nothing but OS level system calls in it, then you might be in luck 
by just re-compiling.  However, it seems even in the OS system call 
libraries different vendors provided slightly different APIs
(the networking calls between BSD and System V seem to come to mind).

The problem here is that on one platform, the system call would 
require say 3 args, but on a different one, require only 2.  
Sometimes it was what they returned, say an float rather than an int.

So, yeah, on the surface, they're all UNIXy, but underneath the 
covers, they're all completely different.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
Key fingerprint = 1660 FECC 5D21 D286 F853  E808 BB07 9239 53F1 28EE

	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!