* Mihai Popescu <mih...@gmail.com> [2014-04-21 17:21]:
> Is there a paper explaining the purpose of Linux compatibility in OpenBSD?
> I'm not from UNIX time and I'm curious when and why this feature was added.

it's the only binay compat left, we deleted all the others. it is
useful to some to run closed-source software. at least one of our
developers cares enough to update it every once in a while so that
newer stuff works. i personally haven't used it in ages, probably more
than a decade - but pplz requirements vary.

to understand the purpose of the binary compats, you really have to go
way back in history. there was a time when the only way to run a
grapical browser on openbsd was to use the netscape binary under BSDi
emulation (I think it was BSDi, not 100% certain) on i386 or the solaris
binary under emulation on a sparc. there was no open source graphical
browser back then.

-- 
Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org
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