UnifiedKernel - os-independent applications

Maybe some of you have tried the emulator , which can run windows applications within linux box, as it has to translate every windows API on-the-fly, WINE suffers great performance issue just from its beginning! So people are working on new possible solutions to run windows applications under linux with more efficient performance, and there are really successful ones!

 

Here I am very exicted to introduce UnifiedKernel (, or ) to you!

UnifiedKernel is a Chinese open source project, lead by 毛德操, one author of the well-known kernel book 《linux内核源代码情景分析》. UnifiedKernel introduces native support of windows PE format to linux kernel, it implements in the kernel almost all SYSTEM-CALLs of microsoft windows, and allows windows applications running under linux with almost their native performance! No API-Translation is needed any more! Windows executables (*.exe) can now launch directly from linux shell just like other linux utilities! Surely exciting enough! Windows users now find there applications can not only seamlessly but also with high performance, running under linux! The new age of OS-Independent application begins!

 

Windows application à DLLs à Linux kernel(with UnifiedKernel patched)

 

The functionality of UnifiedKernel are achieved by the following aspects:

* Patches to linux kernel, such as task_struct, etc.

* A loadable kernel module : unifiedkernel.ko, with memory management, thread/process management, etc.

* DLL equivalent of windows, from WINE, such as ntdll.dll, etc.

 

I write a sample code to test UnifiedKernel, first running on windows:

 

And then play the same executable on linux:

 

We can see there is an native linux process, called hell.exe, running, with pid 4023, instead of WINE process:

 

And here comes the big axe:

After I copy the whole directory of SourceInsight from its windows installation to linux filesystem, add some registry entries, I successfully launch the famous code editor into outer-space! No WINE, No Kidding, Here are the snapshots:

 

 

UnifiedKernel gives us a more efficient way than WINE to run windows applications under linux, but I don’t know how efficient it really is. UnifiedKernel is currently under heavy development, and calls for any voluntary contributors, maybe you can be one of them! UnifiedKernel currently not support SMP, and has many things left there to be done, but those would not dim its light, maybe some days later, in the near future I think, UnifiedKernel will be the proud of open source community, and also the proud of China!

See also