Noah port (and alternatives?)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 28, 2020, at 16:08, Ces VLC wrote:

> I'm looking for a Linux user mode emulation on Mac, and I just found Noah on github, and then realized there's already a port for it. From what I've read, it seems it's quite experimental (BTW: there were some merged PRs a few days ago, that are not included in the 0.5.1 tag that the port is downloading right now).

That's undoubtedly true for most software projects: their developers make improvements to them, and after a time the developers decide that the work they've done is ready to be made available to users and they make a new release. When they do, we'll update the port.


> Said this, do you know of any other attempt at Linux user-mode emulation on Mac, or is Noah the only project you've seen about this? (note that qemu has user mode emulation, but, AFAIK, it requires the host system and the guest system to be the same, making it useful only for running binaries for other architectures in the same OS).
> 
> If you don't know of any other alternatives or attempts, maybe I should consider improving Noah, but I'd prefer not to reinvent the wheel...

I'm not aware of any alternatives but I haven't looked for any either. I added the noah port to MacPorts in the hopes that it would spur interest and maybe increased development activity. We found that the developer of noah had been hired by Microsoft to implement a similar feature in Windows, which might explain why the open source version that works on macOS has not gotten much attention. If the original developer no longer has interest or time to work on the software or is under an NDA from their employer that prevents them from doing so it may need to be forked and continued by a new interested developer.