News Group Posts

intel binaries vs. sparc

From: Richard.L.Hamilton@mindwarp.smart.net (Richard L. Hamilton)
Subject: Re: SCO Binaries on Solaris
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:15:05 -0000
Message-ID: <11grdi93vae8330@corp.supernews.com> 
References: <1124970552.526152.158130@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> 

In article <1124970552.526152.158130@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
	keith@actual-systems.com writes:
> We currently use Foxpro on SCO Openserver and have recently beeen
> moving towards using Linux patched with linux-abi (to allow SCO
> binaries to run.)
> 
> However we now have some potential clients who run Solaris boxes so I
> was wondering (as I have no experience of Solaris,) if it is possible
> to run SCO binaries under Solaris.

Looking at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/801-6735/6i13eq5ed?a=view I'd
say "maybe", if they only used stuff covered by those ABIs, didn't depend
on system-specific pathnames, were dynamically linked with libc (and
libsocket if applicable), didn't do any X11 (probably), and no doubt a few
other restrictions that I haven't thought of.  But in practice, even if
it's _possible_, there could be bugs that happen to work out ok on one but
not on the other, or other situations that could result in unexpected
behavior.  And what those ABIs cover is perhaps a good deal less than
SUSv3 or whatever newer standards offer on both systems (that would be
perfectly reasonable for a responsible programmer, even one that was
trying to have their _source_ fairly portable, might be using).  So I for
one would probably not want to depend on that in a production environment,
or for any software that included multiple binaries, scripts, etc, unless
all such components were thoroughly tested on both platforms; and arguably
not even then.



-- 
mailto:rlhamil@smart.net  http://www.smart.net/~rlhamil

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