Open Source Summit Japan

In this talk, we present Noah, a Linux binary compatibility layer for macOS based on hypervisor technology. Noah executes Linux ELF binaries by loading it into a hypervisor in which no kernel code is running. System calls invoked by the Linux program are trapped by the hypervisor and handled by the user program running on the host OS. Noah is designed to be more efficient, secure, and portable, compared to other Linux binary compatibility layers including Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). We will describe in detail how our hypervisor-based approach works and how linux system calls are translated. Performance comparisons with other related technologies will be presented for various practical situations. We will also discuss possible business applications of our compatibility technology.