Hi friends,

one of my friends who is working for a scientific research center has a software that he wants ported from Solaris to Linux. The software isnt open source, so i cant make out like what system calls is it making.

Hopefully its not bound to the kernel, so bearing that, can anyone tell me the workaround for this task considering both cases. i.e. the app is bound to the kernel, and it aint bound to the kernel. If anyone cud point me to resources, that would be of great help.

Thanx!
CaptainRon

How do you want to port a software you don't have the source code ?

Well thats what makes me ask this question...

How to port a software that doesnt have its source code visible to me, and exists in compiled form on the system. See logically i could port a Red Hat Application to SuSe, without necessarily having its source code.

I do understand that the difference in kernel of Solaris and Linux Kernel may be quite a lot, but what i want to know is to what extent are the two kernels different? I suppose some memory mapping and scheduling techniques differ... but to what extent could these differences stop me from porting the application?

That should be easy, but is not what is ussually called porting.

The kernels are certainly somewhat different, but far much closer that say Linux and Windows. But why are you focusing on the kernel ? There are many issues that may arise before you reach the kernel.
If you have no source code, I suppose all you got are binary executable files plus possibly some text/data/script files.
You first have to make sure these binaries are in some way compatible with the target system.
For example if the binaries are for Solaris on SPARC, and you target system is some Linux distro on x86, you can be sure the binary is uncompatible.
If both are x86, you have to make sure the executable format is compatible. Here again, although Linux has switched to Solaris format (ELF) a while ago, they are not strictly compatible, so you need some kind of emulation techniques to try having this software run in the other environment. One available is lxrun, that allows some application to run. Another not yet available is LAE (Linux Application Environment) from Sun, that will allow the same kind of thing, here again I guess only if your original program is for Solaris on x86.

Again, you are not going to port the application as you haven't the source code, but really you want to try to adapt the application environment for it to run properly.

Finally, you may also try a different way, based on virtual machine emulation, commercial (VMware, ...) and free (Qemu, ...) products exists that will allow you to install Solaris in a virtual environment, itself running on Linux. Depending on if the CPU architecture match, you may also find it worthing to be investigated.

Thanx jlliagre.

I suppose I wud try my luck in the order you have mentioned. As far as the machine is concerned, both the source and target machines are same.

I checked out lxRun, have u tested it ever? Seems like it should be able to solve my problem.
Maybe in the end i finally resort to Qemu...

Ok tell me one more thing, what are the chances of inter UNIX transfer? Can I shift it to FreeBSD UNIX? What all can be the difficulties that arise then?

Thanx a lot for the help!

cya

Sure, it has improved greatly with the years, I'm currently using it to run a proprietary epson driver not available for Solaris, but available for Linux.
I think BSD has a Linux emulation layer, something like what will be Solaris LAE.