Hello *, On Jun 3, 2016, at 2:02 AM, Christopher Samuel <[email protected]> wrote: >> I don’t know exactly when it was introduced, but I see references for it >> in the kernel since at least 2006 (this is as far as the git logs go for >> the kernel). > > Arrived in 2.1.43: > > ftp://ftp.u-aizu.ac.jp/pub/os/Linux/kernel/v2.1/patch-html/patch-2.1.43/linux_Documentation_Configure.help.html > > It'll be 19 years old on June 15th. :-)
Yes, THAT! I clearly remember it was one of the configurable options during kernel compilation, back then in the '90s; It was basically used to run foreign binaries, wherever there was some kind of hook to handle them. (*) Today it still finds great similar use, fi. to spawn binaries for ARM, run qemu’d simulated over x86_64. F. (*) Copying this from: http://www.linux-kongress.org/1999/abstracts_main.html , it resonates with some experiences here: “”” As more applications were being ported, the usability of our development environment and system mode simulation speed became a real concern. User applications don't necessarily require to run on the actual IA64-kernel, so user-mode emulation is often just fine. Operating in a cross compilation environment was annoying because most standard RPM packages are not really constructed to be recompiled that way. Fixing the Makefiles can be really tedious as some applications use helper programs during the build phase. For those reasons, we decided to work on getting what we called ''NUE'' (Native User Environment) which would give the illusion of a native IA-64 environment on our x86 host. This was very simple to achieve when combining our simulator (user-level mode) and Linux's binfmt_misc code inside a chroot'ed tree. Now you can invoke standard x86 and IA-64 binaries directly from your shell prompt. In this closed environment, as, cc, ld, really are cross compilation tools but look like native. The C library and include files are in their natural location. Thus, it becomes very easy to rebuild RPM packages without changing one line of Makefile: a simple rpm --rebuild suffices most of the time. “”” -- echo "sysadmin know better bash than english" | sed s/min/mins/ \ | sed 's/better bash/bash better/' # signal detected in a CERN forum
