Comment by aa-jv
11 hours ago
Oddly enough, I could kind of use this right now. I have some software which used SCSI (Adaptec WNASPI32.dll) calls to administer a device over the SCSI bus .. would this Subsystem be usable for that, or does it still require I build a WNASP32.dll shim to do translation?
So, you have Windows software. This "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux" just boots Windows 95. I don't know what you would use the Linux part for. Care to explain more what you want to do?
If you want to run your windows software in Linux, you could try Wine. Wine seems to have support for WNASPI so it's possible your software would just work. (You might have to run Wine as root I guess, to get access to the SCSI devices.)
If Wine doesn't work, Windows in QEMU with PCI passthrough to the SCSI controller might have better chances to work.
I need raw SCSI I/O to be virtualizable in the linux context, so I could run a Windows app (yes it already works in Wine), and have it 'see' a SCSI device as if it were real hardware.
Wines WNASPI32.dll is really just a facade - it doesn't provide actual SCSI services, its just there for SCSI-using apps to think they have ASPI onboard - so for my case I would need to write a shim to pass through SCSI IO requests to a Linux service - or loopback file? - to actually process the requests. I've been meaning to do this for a long time, but if there is some way I can set up a loopback file under Linux to 'pretend' to be a SCSI block device for a Windows app, I'd sure like to know if its possible ..