Monday, February 21 2005 @ 07:54 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
Big Blue has created a guide for programmers porting from Unix to Linux.
Much of today's enterprise-level software on UNIX® caters to the business needs of large companies. And so it must support emerging technologies and follow the rapidly evolving market trends, such as the proliferation of the powerful, flexible Linux™ operating system. Because much of this software is large, multi-threaded, and multi-process, porting it to Linux presents challenges. In this article, get a checklist and advice derived from a real-world port of one piece of enterprise-level software to Linux.
One of the realities of current business IT practices is that many organizations are moving IT to Linux, given its flexibility and stability as a system platform. Another reality is that existing enterprise-level software is too valuable to be discarded. These two realities often crash into each other, but it is critical that they be resolved.
Porting enterprise-level software to Linux can present some interesting challenges. Care has to be taken at all stages -- from making design choices to getting the build system to work to finally getting the OS-specific code to cooperate with Linux.
This article is based on my experiences on RHEL and SLES distributions running C applications on Intel and IBM eServer zSeries architectures, but the lessons could easily be extended to other distributions and architectures as well.
