Comment by evidencetamper

Plus there are other advantages that I always say should never be discounted, such as desktop integration, that you get when you can replace the toolkit (dynamic) libraries rather than just "running everything in a VM". Running everything in a VM is a poor excuse for backwards compatibility.

Old DOS games are often sold (e.g. on GOG or Steam) with an installer and a full copy of DOSBox, so you get an entire operating system plus hardware emulator to run the game. Looks like this adds less than 10 MB to each game installed in Windows.

How should a microkernel run (WASI) WASM runtimes?

Docker can run WASM runtimes, but I don't think podman or nerdctl can yet.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779803 :

  docker run \
    --runtime=io.containerd.wasmedge.v1 \
    --platform=wasi/wasm \
    secondstate/rust-example-hello

From > ostree native containers are bootable host images that can also be built and signed with a SLSA provenance attestation; https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility :

> To handle this correctly, each libc version would need a way to enumerate files across all other libc instances, including dynamically loaded ones, ensuring that every file is visited exactly once without forming cycles. This enumeration must also be thread-safe. Additionally, while enumeration is in progress, another libc could be dynamically loaded (e.g., via dlopen) on a separate thread, or a new file could be opened (e.g., a global constructor in a dynamically loaded library calling fopen).

FWIU, ROP Return-Oriented Programming and Gadgets approaches have implementations of things like dynamic header discovery of static and dynamic libraries at runtime; to compile more at runtime (which isn't safe, though: nothing reverifies what's mutated after loading the PE into process space, after NX tagging or not, before and after secure enclaves and LD_PRELOAD (which some go binaries don't respect, for example).

Can a microkernel do eBPF?

What about a RISC machine for WASM and WASI?

"Customasm – An assembler for custom, user-defined instruction sets" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42717357

Maybe that would shrink some of these flatpaks which ship their own Electron runtimes instead of like the Gnome and KDE shared runtimes.

Python's manylinux project specifies a number of libc versions that manylinux packages portably target.

Manylinux requires a tool called auditwheel for Linux, delicate for MacOS, and delvewheel for windows;

Auditwheel > Overview: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42347468 :

> A manylinux_x_y wheel requires glibc>=x.y. A musllinux_x_y wheel requires musl libc>=x.y; per PEP 600