What would be LAE for? [LWN.net]

What would be LAE for?

Posted Nov 20, 2004 11:37 UTC (Sat) by bockman (guest, #3650)
Parent article: Solaris 10

Why would Solaris (or any other Unix OS) need a linux compatibility layer? I don't see any reason for that. Open-source software can be compiled natively on Solaris, and precompiled packets for Solaris are often available on the Net (I believe Sun itselfs on request provides a CD with some pre-compiled OSS). Proprietary server software, like Oracle, is supported on Solaris, which still runs a large part of today servers.

So, what am I missing?

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What would be LAE for?

Posted Nov 20, 2004 23:16 UTC (Sat) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link]

There are several binary-only Linux apps which a user may want to run on Solaris/x86. And speaking as a Blastwave maintainer, it's not always trivial to recompile Linux appss for Solaris -- quite a few open source packages require GNU tar to expand, GNU autoconf to configure and GNU make, gcc, GNU ld and glibc to compile. Even then, there are some that use Llinux-specific syscalls.