co-linux

Christopher Faylor cgf-no-personal-reply-please@cygwin.com
Thu Apr 15 13:18:00 GMT 2004


On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 01:22:50PM +0100, Chris January wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 02:50:42PM +0200, Pinhas Krengel wrote:
>> >I have just read about beta release of co-linux (linux on
>> windows). Is this product going to kill cygwin.
>>
>> No.
>>
>>>What will be the benefits of using cygwin in that case.
>
>>Having a nicely integrated UNIX environment.  Colinux just allows you
>>to run a separate linux subsystem under windows.  There isn't any real
>>communication between windows and linux other than via networking.
>
>I spent some time working on porting Linux to Windows myself (with some
>success, but I shelved the project after CoLinux came out) and it may
>be possible to use CoLinux to service Linux system calls in a standard
>Windows process giving you the best of both worlds.  AFAICT the only
>thing required to do this is to introduce the notion of 'foreign'
>processes and allow the Linux kernel to read/write to/from a Windows
>process' address space.  That way you could link against both Windows
>DLLs and Linux shared objects (via the Linux loader as ported in LINE).
>CoLinux could run as a Windows service.  Not that this would actually
>gain you much mind, since I can't think of anyone who releases binary
>only code for Linux but not for Windows.  It would be really nice to be
>able to run Valgrind on Windows as well, but that's another story.

Can we put this issue to bed now?  Yes, many things are possible, with a
sufficient amount of programming effort.  It is unlikely in the extreme
that anyone in *this* mailing list is going to take the gauntlet and
implement a sophisticated enhancement to Linux.

The question was asked and it was answered a few times in various ways.
The answer is simple: No, this project, in its current incarnation is
not going to kill Cygwin.  Even co-linux did what you are talking about,
having to set up a complete linux installation would be a huge barrier
to entry for anyone interested in this functionality.

cgf

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