New Linux app runs inside Windows
p2pnet.net News:- “If Linux runs on every architecture, why should another operating system be in its way?” – asks Dan Aloni, a 21-year-old Israeli who, to answer his own question, has developed an open source Linux application he calls CoLinux that runs inside Microsoft’s Windows.
That’ll give Bill and the Boyz nightmares. It’ll probably also upset Dan O’Dowd who’s already convinced the world will come to an end unles someone does something about Linux.
“Cooperative Linux is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine,” says Aloni on his web page here.
“For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software. In its current condition, it allows us to run the KNOPPIX Japanese Edition on Windows.”
Special driver software on the host OSis executes the coLinux kernel in a privileged mode (known as ring 0 or supervisor mode) and by constantly switching the machine’s state between the host OS state and and the coLinux kernel state, “coLinux is given full control of the physical machine’s MMU (ie, paging and protection) in its own specially allocated address space, and is able to act just like a native kernel, achieving almost the same performance and functionality that can be expected from a regular Linux which could have ran on the same machine standalone,” says Aloni.
“Since coLinux uses the same binary format for user-space executables as native Linux, coLinux can load and run an existing unmodified Linux distribution concurrently with the host OS.”
CoLinux doesn’t access I/O devices directly to cooperatively share hardware with the host OS, Aloni says, going on:
“Instead, it interfaces with emulated devices provided by the coLinux drivers in the host OS. For example, a regular file in Windows can be used as a block device in coLinux. All real hardware interrupts are transparently forwarded to the host OS, so this way the host OS’s control of the real hardware is not being disturbed and thus it continues to run smoothly.
“Unlike User Mode Linux, coLinux always utilizes only one process of the host OS for all its Linux processes, privately managing their scheduling, resources, and faults in a manner which is contained and entirely independent of the way the host OS is implemented. In fact, coLinux only requires a very small set of commonly exported primitives from the host OS kernel in order to work, thus, it can be rather easily ported to run under any operating system, such as Solaris, or even Linux itself.”
CoLinux is being ported to run under ReactOS, the Open Source Windows clone, says Aloni’s site.
Aloni is a graduate of an IDF ( Israel Defence Force) computer unit and developed his project along with several Japanese programmers who, like him, are members of the open source community on the Internet, says a report on haaretz.com here, adding:
“Pini Cohen a senior informations systems analyst at computer research company Meta Group Israel has called the development “an important stage in breaking Microsoft’s monopoly.”
“He said: ‘As the trend is for Linux to take a more important role in organizations, Aloni’s development is extremely interesting. The question is how Microsoft will react and whether it will allow support for Windows systems if they have Linux systems installed on them.’ Microsoft has so far made no comment on Aloni’s development.”
Downloads are available from sourceforge here.
April 14th, 2004 at 8:47 am
Microsoft probably will hack the next service pack to take care of the ring 0 issue thus making a coexisting OS impossible.