Preliminary support for running 32-bit Linux binaries

[Andrew Gallatin]

Tim Robbins writes:
 > I'm pleased to announce that my work on running 32-bit Linux binaries
 > on FreeBSD/amd64 has come to the point where it runs almost everything I
 > throw at it, including the Sun JDK, OpenOffice.org and Acrobat Reader.

Awesome!  I was sort of half planning to do this myself if nobody else
stepped up, but I was waiting for module support.  Did you do this
all monolithically?  Wow!  Anyway, I'm very happy that you did this.

 > The patch and some brief notes on installing the Linux base system and
 > a few popular applications are available at:
 > http://people.freebsd.org/~tjr/linux32.html
 > 

I had a little trouble applying this patch, since the diff
referred to new files as:
../src.vendor/sys/amd64/linux/linux.h  Thu Jan  1 10:00:00 1970
rather than /dev/null.  This seemed to confuse my patch.

I needed to hand-edit the patch and replace these new file
references with /dev/null instead in order to get the new
files created.   I also made the sys/amd64/linux/ directory by hand.

Anyway, once I got the new files extracted, things went without
a hitch.  Realplayer, OO, Acrobat, etc.  Nice job!

 > I'm aware of a number of problems with this patch -- I'm making it
 > available in the current state for people to experiment with, and because
 > I won't have time to tidy it up & commit it to CVS for at least 2 weeks.

Question -- do you plan to allow 32-bit and 64-bit linux modules
to coexist?  I can see a need for 64-bit compat at some point...
Especially if people want to run PGI compiled fortran or c programs.



Thanks!

Drew