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Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

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Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#81

Post by tliltocatl »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #17
nolist_policy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UML runs only on Linux and only on x86, amd64 and powerpc. Which is a real shame, otherwise you could run a full Linux kernel on all these arm Android devices.

A shame, true, imagine having a whole Linux kernel as a macOS binary, running Linux containers with as little overhead as possible.

Page-grained mappings UML does make for tons of overhead. AFAIR Linux even considered a specialized reverse page mapping structure just to accelerate those, but ultimately dropped it because of memory overhead and code complexity.

Realistically, the overhead isn't ever going to be lower than hardware virtualization unless one goes for an API proxy a-la wine and WSL1 - but that's tons of work.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#82

Post by shric »

wqaatwt wrote: post #79
graemep wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you prefer that to using a graphics card know to be stable under Linux? The simplest thing is to buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.

Because non-Nvidia GPUs almost universally suck for anything besides gaming? (and even then if you want stuff like RT).

I've been using Linux with Nvidia GPUs since the RIVA TNT up to the RTX 4090, it works just fine.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#83

Post by da-x »

Hi. I'm Dan Aloni, original author of this project. It still warms my heart to see this pops in HN every few years. The others who have worked on it and myself are keeping that site as the good relic that it obviously should be :)

It still amazes me how breakthrough it was to have that working, given the lack of hardware virtualization for PCs in late 2003.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#84

Post by tombl »

aninteger wrote: post #21

I wonder if something like this might make a comeback for workers that are blocked from using wsl/hyperv on their corporate laptops. For me I've been using msys2 as an "alternative" since I'm unable to use wsl. It's not the same but it's all I got.

Expect to see something in this space eventually - I'm currently working on a cross-platform userspace port of Linux.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#85

Post by unaindz »

quantumspandex wrote: post #76
herewulf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forgot to mention that the Linux kernel was printing warnings about the memory so it somehow knew something was wrong and was able to mitigate the damage. So you were just "unlucky"? ;) I won't claim to be an expert in either kernel but if you take both our cases (anecdatum) it seems that Linux is better at recognizing a problem and either mitigating it or failing hard. The latter sitatiion is much better than Wind…

I get the opposite experience nowadays. Still having to debug random issues that are only on Linux.

In my experience Linux can have some driver bugs on specific hardware that windows doesn't, like not waking up after suspend on some Nvidia cards with some drivers, etc. But it handles hardware issues miles better.

90% of hard drives that windows does not detect Linux can detect and copy 99% of the data with some IO errors for the rest. Can handle hardware instability like bad rams or too high of an overclock for ages while windows crashes very easily.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#86

Post by lproven »

spwa4 wrote: post #65
itsmartapuntocm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it was tongue in cheek.

Not really. It really is a linux kernel that uses the ancient windows (pre-95, or pre-NT) technique of "cooperative" multitasking. It works on everything. It's super efficient. However, one process fails (or just slows down) or corrupts memory and it takes your entire system (in this case all other linux processes) down with it.

I am often surprised by how many HN commenters can't see a joke even when it is pointed out to them that IT IS A JOKE.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#87

Post by lproven »

badc0ffee wrote: post #34
quotemstr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site is down, so I can't see what they're doing with the MMU: that said, most virtual memory management works just fine from normal boring userspace. If wine can do it for running win32 on Linux, this thing can do it for running Linux stuff on win32, which isn't less powerful when it comes to virtual memory management.

It's been years since I used Wine, but I think it just runs each Windows process in its own Linux process. There's no Wine "kernel" that needs to manage virtual memory or isolate multiple processes.

AIUI this is correct, yes.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#88

Post by rahen »

lelandbatey wrote: post #71
p_ing wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not going to take over NT's control of the MMU et. al. without elevated privileges. To run as a non-admin, you either need a VM that leverages NT's built-in virtualization capabilities (requires admin to enable), a separate personality (requires admin to install), or a Win32 application a la cygwin, which isn't very good.

Don't besmirch the good name of Cygwin, I daily drove that for Python development for 2 years and it worked shockingly well. In retrospect I think I liked Cygwin more than I liked WSL because I really could interoperate my Linux/Windows together nearly seamlessly. But I think that was because I was operating and using tools right in the sweet spot of the Cygwin abstraction; e.g. no GUI programs, sockets/file work onl…

Agreed. For a long time, Cygwin was the best Unix userland. It also fit conveniently into a single folder, allowing multiple portable environments on the same machine. Mingw was pretty nice too.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#89

Post by gbraad »

da-x wrote: post #83

Hi. I'm Dan Aloni, original author of this project. It still warms my heart to see this pops in HN every few years. The others who have worked on it and myself are keeping that site as the good relic that it obviously should be :) It still amazes me how breakthrough it was to have that working, given the lack of hardware virtualization for PCs in late 2003.

I created the images for Fedora, CentOS and OpenSuse. it thought me a lot about the dependencies, Linux image builds, etc... it was creating 'container'-images before this was a general thing.

Re: Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)

#90

Post by haddr »

da-x wrote: post #83

Hi. I'm Dan Aloni, original author of this project. It still warms my heart to see this pops in HN every few years. The others who have worked on it and myself are keeping that site as the good relic that it obviously should be :) It still amazes me how breakthrough it was to have that working, given the lack of hardware virtualization for PCs in late 2003.

It seems that today we can achieve similar functionality in fundamentally different ways (WSL, WSL2/virtualisation, Cygwin, etc.) What in your opinion is today's closest solution to colinux? and why we don't see such clever solutions today?
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