Toss legacy stuff to VMs? [LWN.net]

Toss legacy stuff to VMs?

Posted May 11, 2026 19:25 UTC (Mon) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188)
Parent article: Providing 64KB base pages with 4KB kernels, two different ways

Can legacy stuff be made to run in legacy VMs, while the modern stuff that fetches page size at runtime gets to run natively?

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Toss legacy stuff to VMs?

Posted May 11, 2026 20:48 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Some kind of `binfmt_misc` with QEMU mediating perhaps?

Toss legacy stuff to VMs?

Posted May 12, 2026 16:58 UTC (Tue) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]

I believe the full extent of this thought would be mapping ABI capabilities to the release version (and calling them personalities like VMS or Windows NT did) and running everything that doesn't specify the version under a legacy dont_break_userspace personality in order to ... not break userspace. I suspect this is an antipattern because it fragments the interface and would allow non-upstreamed ABI changes to be held against the Linux community.

K3n.

Toss legacy stuff to VMs?

Posted May 14, 2026 0:12 UTC (Thu) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608) [Link]

Sure. That's how Asahi Linux runs Steam.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/muvm