kentjhall
why not userspace
This is definitely an intriguing approach, but it seems unnecessary to patch the kernel when translation layers like Wine can work entirely in userspace. What is the rationale behind resorting to patching all over the kernel?
While Wine doesn't necessarily need to deal with direct syscalls in most cases, there was actually a solution developed for the cases when it is in fact needed: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/syscall-user-dispatch.html
Are there any other blockers for doing the translation in userspace, and if so, did you inquire about possible solutions on the LKML?
Doing this in kernelspace seems like a last resort, and apart from syscalls (for which the kernel side of the solution now exists) I don't see any immediately obvious blockers for doing the translation in userspace?
Apart from being much cleaner and requiring less maintenance, doing the translation fully in userspace would make it possible to package the project in general purpose distributions, running horizon applications alongside standard Linux desktop.
