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.

 

Customer Reviews & Comments
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. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)