ABI for i386 binaries under FreeBSD-amd64



Hi,

I have seen that recently on the mailing list there has been a discussion on
running i386 FreeBSD binaries under an amd64 system. As far as I have been
able to read there does not appear to be anyway of achieving this except
though either a chroot/jail or vitalization. I think this is a short fall
of FreeBSD currently as there are still proprietary i386 programs for
FreeBSD that people may want to use under FreeBSD. For me it is the Unreal
Tournament series that all have i386 binaries (running under Linux ABI). (I
do not think this short fall is of any major significance as the majority of
programs people use can be compiled under ports. Thank you for such a
wonderful infrastructure, truly a jewel for FreeBSD).

Onto my questions (most appropriate since this is the freebsd-questions
mailing list :-):
1) Is it possible to set up something along the lines of the Linuxulator for
i386 binary support including a ghost file hierarchy under
/compat/freebsd-i386 (or something more appropriate)? This should not be
too hard as the kernel already has i386 support.
2) Could the above also be extended to give support for running i386 and
amd64 Linux binaries under FreeBSD (with an additional directory hierarchy
under /compat?)?
3) With the appropriate files under /compat would it be reasonably easy to
set up a cross-architecture build system with ports, where all
cross-compiled ports are installed under /compat?

Could someone please add the above ideas to the Project Ideas page provided
they are of sufficient quality.

Thank you for listening to me.

David
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxx"



Relevant Pages

  • Re: Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything
    ... then for shells the FreeBSD VM shares maximally without using ... only thing that has changed recently is a few binaries in /bin and /sbin. ... "once during boot" case is interesting in the aggregate, ... Shells, which are run for extended periods of time, and which are ...
    (freebsd-current)
  • Re: ELF dynamic loader name [was: sbrk(2) broken]
    ... While this doesn't count as an explicit vote against the rename, ... gdb is built to debug binaries for a particular architecture. ... this is the first time that FreeBSD ... Now we are concidering to deploy amd64, ...
    (freebsd-current)
  • Re: differences between /bin, /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin
    ... all *existing* versions FreeBSD ships only static binaries in /bin. ... the BSD traditionalists in that thread are ... Sun has announced that there will be no static system libraries at all ...
    (comp.unix.programmer)
  • Re: Security Check Diffs Question
    ... If you have access to the same binaries on another machine, ... > - Most of the inodes staid the same. ... > No form of disk restructuring, fsck, defrag, etc, was initiated by me. ... Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD) ...
    (FreeBSD-Security)
  • Re: Security Check Diffs Question
    ... If you have access to the same binaries on another machine, ... > - Most of the inodes staid the same. ... > No form of disk restructuring, fsck, defrag, etc, was initiated by me. ... Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD) ...
    (FreeBSD-Security)