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Comment by vmlinuz | Hacker News Reader

Many many years ago, when I was working at a large 3-letter-starting-with-S Unix company (no, not the graphics guys, nor the suing-Linux-for-Microsoft guys), we were planning a Linux compatibility layer... At the time, there were a couple of options out there - lxrun and uml. Anyone remember lxrun? I tested them both and did a little write-up, basically saying that neither of them ran reliably or fast enough to be worth adopting

What we decided was to go with option 3 - we implemented a Linux system call interface within our own kernel to give us 'native' support. This, of course, is exactly what the first version of WSL did, many years later. Plus ça change...

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Didn't FreeBSD do this before Solaris?

> What we decided was to go with option 3 - we implemented a Linux system call interface within our own kernel to give us 'native' support. This, of course, is exactly what the first version of WSL did, many years later. Plus ça change...

Joyent as well for SmartOS.

In fact, we revived the same code the poster above is talking about, I believe!

Cantrill was one of our reviewers!

I wonder if that was before SunOS binaries ran on SPARC Linux; I must have been doing that at least 15 years ago.

>at a large 3-letter-starting-with-S Unix company (no, not the graphics guys, nor the suing-Linux-for-Microsoft guys)

Is it Sun? Why use more than 20 words to (probably) mean "for Sun"?

Presumably they think this is a defense that will hold up in court as plausible deniability if they are ever sued for defamation relating to this comment.

Sun doesn't exist anymore though. Is getting sued even a possibility?

In the hypothetical scenario that this commenter is implying that Solaris contains (or contained) a load of IP which is non-clean-roomed Linux copyright (is that the implication??), then the current owners of Solaris would be the ones getting in trouble with - the FSF? That would be Oracle.

https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/

And it would be Oracle chasing the commenter for an NDA breach, I suppose.

Neither does SCO, so the point is moot :)

You guys are weird. It was just a bit of wordplay :D

I hope you don't code the way you talk ;)

Seriously though, it's bad writing. Not a crime as bad as starting an off-topic subthread, but still...

No fun allowed here on HN

I didn't really have an issue with what you wrote. It made me realize there are several three-letter, starts-with-S, Unix companies.

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