[lug] windows on windows for linux?

Chan Kar Heng karheng at softhome.net
Sun Mar 24 05:42:24 MST 2002


greetings.

would anyone know of something that might be equivalent
to WOW64 (windows on windows 64) layer for linux?
or maybe the approach taken for migration to 64 bit
platform for linux?

i've just been doing a little bit of reading on migration
from 32 bit platforms to 64 bit platforms only recently
(sheepish look) though it has been something on discussion
since a while back it seems...

the significance would be at the level of binary
compatibility. (hope i used the right terms... :) )
anyway, was especially curious how shared objects
or dynamic link libraries currently built for 32 bit
platforms would run on 64 bit platforms.... or would
they run or exist at all? the problem with longer or
shorter data types such as ints or longs or chars could
have been avoided all together through proper coding
practice... but what about pointers? (eg: registering
a function from a 64 bit platform library as a callback
function to a 32 bit platform library.. say gtk...
and of course, assuming there isn't a 64 bit version
of gtk yet..).

at the moment, it would seem rather "out" to do a complete
reinstall of pure 64 bit stuff on a linux box if the
linux box had been previously running pure 32 bit stuff.
to make matters worse, the box could have been a heavy
database server.

the way m$ takes is to introduce wow64, just as they had
introduced wow32 to allow win9x and its genre to execute
win16 binaries. how it specifically works is somewhat
still a wonder to me... they used to have win32s, but it
seems to server a rather different purpose. (at one point
i was looking for win64s over google.. :) ).

i havn't really dug out details for migration to 64 bit
platform for linux. some that i have encountered for the
general unix environment simply suggests adoptation of
LP64. (and it sure sounds as if they would expect everyone
to recompile and build 64 bit binaries for everything
overnight...). 

so anyone has anything to share?


rgds from your silent but friendly lurker,

kh






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