UNIX to Linux® Porting: A Comprehensive Reference [Paperback]

Alfredo Mendoza (Author), Chakarat Skawratananond (Author), Artis Walker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0131871099 | ISBN-13: 978-0131871090 | Edition: 1

Port Your UNIX(R) Applications to Linux(R)--Quickly, Efficiently, and Reliably Increasingly, developers, architects, and project managers face the challenge of porting their C, C++, and Java applications from UNIX(R) to Linux(R) environments. Now, there's a definitive, start-to-finish guide to porting applications from today's most widely used UNIX platforms: Solaris , HP-UX, and AIX(R). Three of IBM's most-experienced Linux porting specialists lead you through your entire project: scoping, analysis, recoding, and testing. They present a start-to-finish porting methodology, realistic discussions of key porting tasks, and a questionnaire for assessing the work involved in any new project. You'll discover what Linux offers in terms of APIs, library functions, versioning, system features, and tools--and the implications for your project. Next, the authors address each individual UNIX(R) platform in detail, identifying specific porting challenges and best-practice solutions.Coverage includes * Understanding the Linux environment: GNU binutils, Java environments, shells, packaging options, and more * Uncovering and addressing project unknowns, variables, and other risks * Handling specific platform differences: standards, compilers, linkers, versioning, system/library calls, threads, and more * Testing and debugging ported applications using the GNU debugger and Linux memory leak and performance tracing tools * Contains quick references to UNIX(R) and Linux APIs, compilers, and linker options, and a discussion of porting issues unique to IBM's POWER architecture Whether you need a start-to-finish guide or a concise reference, you'll find this book an indispensable resource for all your UNIX(R)-to-Linux porting projects.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Port Your UNIX® Applications to Linux®–Quickly, Efficiently, and Reliably

Increasingly, developers, architects, and project managers face the challenge of porting their C, C++, and Java applications from UNIX® to Linux® environments. Now, there’s a definitive, start-to-finish guide to porting applications from today’s most widely used UNIX platforms: Solaris™, HP-UX, and AIX®.

 

Three of IBM’s most-experienced Linux porting specialists lead you through your entire project: scoping, analysis, recoding, and testing. They present a start-to-finish porting methodology, realistic discussions of key porting tasks, and a questionnaire for assessing the work involved in any new project. You’ll discover what Linux offers in terms of APIs, library functions, versioning, system features, and tools–and the implications for your project. Next, the authors address each individual UNIX® platform in detail, identifying specific porting challenges and best-practice solutions. Coverage includes

 

·        Understanding the Linux environment: GNU binutils, Java environments, shells, packaging options, and more

·        Uncovering and addressing project unknowns, variables, and other risks

·        Handling specific platform differences: standards, compilers, linkers, versioning, system/library calls, threads, and more

·        Testing and debugging ported applications using the GNU debugger and Linux memory leak and performance tracing tools

·        Contains quick references to UNIX^® and Linux APIs, compilers, and linker options, and a discussion of porting issues unique to IBM’s POWER^™ architecture

 

Whether you need a start-to-finish guide or a concise reference, you’ll find this book an indispensable resource for all your UNIX®-to-Linux porting projects.

 

About the Author

Alfredo (Freddie) Mendoza is an IT specialist in the Business Strategy and Enablement group within the IBM Systems and Technology division with more than 19 years in application architecture and management. He currently works with independent software vendors to port and migrate their applications into IBM cross-platform operating system offerings. Prior to his current position, Mr. Mendoza worked in IBM’s Global Services, for AIX Kernel development organizations, and as an independent consultant for different software development organizations. Mr. Mendoza has authored and coauthored several patent invention publications on thread management and software algorithms. He is the author of the book Introduction to Utility Computing and coauthor of “Design of an Enablement Process for On-Demand Applications” in the Utility Computing issue of the IBM Systems Journal.

 

Chakarat Skawratananond, Ph.D., is a technical consultant in the IBM Business Strategy and Enablement organization. He provides technical assistance to software vendors to bring their applications to IBM POWER processor-based systems running AIX and Linux. He has 10 years of experience in UNIX software development and has published several articles related to Linux software migration and performance tuning. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

 

Artis Walker is a consultant in the IBM Business Strategy and Enablement group. He provides assistance in porting software vendors’ applications and databases to pSeries servers running AIX and Linux on IBM POWER. He has more than 15 years’ experience working on both Microsoft Windows and UNIX platforms, including AIX and Sun Solaris. He has extensive software development experience in IBM DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB), ORACLE, ODBC, JDBC, C, C++, and Java. He has published numerous tutorials and articles on migration and performance tuning on AIX and DB2. In addition, he is the originator and main author of a series of articles titled “IBM Embraces Open Source,” which highlights various open-source solutions and their operability and setup on AIX and Linux on the POWER platform. He holds a BA in computer science from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas.

 

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Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (April 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131871099
• ISBN-13: 978-0131871090
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,957,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Certainly is comprehensive, April 27, 2006

By 

Anthony Lawrence "Unix, Linux and Mac OS X" (Middleboro, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: UNIX to Linux® Porting: A Comprehensive Reference (Paperback)

The cover announces that this is a "Comprehensive Reference". It certainly is, starting with a treatment of Linux development that almost could be a book by itself and ending with testing and development tools and techniques; it covers it all. In between are specifics of porting from Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, in great detail with plenty of advice and examples.

The only thing I'd question is the inclusion of so much unnecessary information. Is it necessary to have tables that show that "-o filename" is identical for both Linux and Solaris compilers (and of course two other tables show the same for HP-UX and AIX)? There is too much of that here; we could have saved a few small trees by leaving that out.

I suppose there are arguments to be made for including everything, but I'd ather concentrate on the differences. I can't fault the ators there: they give extensive coverage to the differences, and it's much more than just superficial listings

of flags or call arguments with differences (though again there's plenty of that too).

Overall, if I were porting from one of those OSes, I'd definitely want this book on my desk.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very valuable and comprehensive guidebook, June 30, 2006

By 

Paul M. Dubuc (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: UNIX to Linux® Porting: A Comprehensive Reference (Paperback)

This book came out at just the right time to help with a large Solaris to Linux porting project. It's written by three IBM engineers who have a lot of experience doing Linux ports. There are a few introductory chapters that discuss many important things to consider in planning and scoping the porting project. These are followed by three chapters that go into great detail on what is involved in porting to Linux from Solaris, AIX and HP-UX (the three most popular UNIX variants). There is also a chapter that covers the use of Linux tools for application testing and debugging and a series of appendices. This is a very good collection of information to have all in one book. It would take quite a bit of digging through manuals and searching in the Internet to come up with information of this quality and detail. The detailed sections cover differences in compilers, linkers, debuggers, shell scripts, threading APIs, signals, system calls, libraries and other system facilities. I can't think of any area that the authors haven't addressed. The book definitely lives up to its subtitle, "A Comprehensive Guide." Note that it doesn't claim to be a "cookbook". Porting is too complex a task for that sort of approach. As and effective guide this book will save huge amounts of time and effort on the porting project and help make sure that you address all the important issues in planning the project.

One approach to porting that the book perhaps doesn't stress enough is a phased approach. The greatest advantage of Linux as a porting target is that all the development and debugging tools that are native to Linux are also available on UNIX. You can start by porting your applications to the GNU compilers, linker and assembler (binutils). All the necessary GNU development tools are available or can be built to run on a wide variety of UNIX platforms (and Microsoft Windows). You can get much of the porting work done without leaving your current operating system or hardware.

If you are not porting from Intel (or Alpha) based hardware, the endian byte ordering of your data could be a big issue. The book touches on this and gives some good pointers to places to look for help but I would like to see this issue addressed in more detail. It's a serious issue that can be the source of elusive runtime problems in a ported application.

Overall this is an excellent book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars lots of gritty details, May 10, 2006

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: UNIX to Linux® Porting: A Comprehensive Reference (Paperback)

This is a reference book, inasmuch as one is unlikely to read it cover to cover. It addresses a necessary but sometimes underappreciated point. That porting from a given Unix operating system to linux can be nontrivial. You probably know that linux tries to be like most unixes, at the command line level. Or indeed, at the structural level in how it partitions the user and kernel functionality. But just like porting from one Unix to another Unix involves a lot of gritty details, so too when decamping to linux.

In recognition of this, there are 3 long chapters, that describe going from Solaris, AIX and HPUX. Long on specifics. Like, consider pipes. A basic enabler of modularity at the command line. Every Unix has this. But did you know that Solaris pipes are full duplex, while linux pipes are half duplex? If you have a Solaris application, you'll have to pull apart some boundary code for its linux counterpart.

The entire book is like this! Nothing fundamentally difficult. Just a lot to check and possibly modify.

The book also has some early chapters which discuss the general aspects of porting from a Unix. It points out issues that you should consider, including a business purpose of why you want to port in the first place. These chapters should give you some clue as to the effort involved, if you decide to port.