Toss legacy stuff to VMs? [LWN.net]

Toss legacy stuff to VMs?

Posted May 11, 2026 20:48 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Toss legacy stuff to VMs? by DemiMarie
Parent article: Providing 64KB base pages with 4KB kernels, two different ways

Some kind of `binfmt_misc` with QEMU mediating perhaps?

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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.