Hi folks, I know I've been MIA for a good while now -- I've been mostly focused on other stuff and haven't had the time to work on GoboLinux, but in the last few weeks I've been slowly working on ressurrecting everyone's favorite vaporware, ViewFS. :-)
And this time I have screenshots! :-D I wrote a quick reimplementation inspired by Flu ( http://piratery.net/flu/ ), a new set of Lua bindings for FUSE, and it's actually working well enough to launch simultaneous binaries with incompatible dependencies. My first test was to grab a very old GoboLinux image and install Netscape 4 in my current 014.01 system. At first I had to launch it using ld-linux.so.2 directly, but it did run: There it is, in all its Glibc-2.2.5-glory: http://hisham.gobolinux.org/viewfs/netscape.png Only today I saw Michael's message announcing his Chromium package, which I had missed. I gave it a try and my machine had a bunch of outdated dependencies, including Glibc. Since this is my main work machine and I didn't want to tweak it too much, I decided to try to launch it using ViewFS. The ld-linux.so.2 hack didn't work because chromium uses /proc/self/exe to find out where it is (the same thing I do in ViewFS to determine contexts, by the way). After banging my head on it for a while I remembered I had solved the exact same problem five years ago when working on the first implementation of ViewFS at IBM. Fortunately, all of the relevant code from that project was open sourced (thanks Ben! :) ) and I still have here with me the program I wrote which actually patches the binary to modify the location of its loader. Once I ran that, voilà: http://hisham.gobolinux.org/viewfs/chromium.png The viewfs code itself is in a very "prototypical" stage yet (views have to be generated by hand using "find -ls" and I'm hardcoding the detection of contexts). Anyway, I'll upload it tomorrow as is. My plans are to keep working on this to make it more generally usable, because from what I've tested so far, this approach seems really viable. Cheers! -- Hisham _______________________________________________ gobolinux-devel mailing list gobolinux-devel@lists.gobolinux.org http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-devel
