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Abstracts - 1997 ANNUAL TECHNICAL CONFERENCE
Porting UNIX to Windows NT
David G. Korn
AT&T Laboratories
Murray Hill, N. J. 07974
Abstract
The Software Engineering Research department at Murray Hill writes and
distributes several widely used development tools and reusable libraries
that are portable across virtually all UNIX platforms.[1] To enhance
reuse of these tools and libraries, we want to make them available on
systems running Windows NT[2] and/or Windows 95[3]. We did not want to
support multiple versions of these libraries, and we wanted to minimize
the amount of conditionally compiled code.
This paper describes an effort of trying to build a UNIX interface
layer on top of the Windows NT and Windows 95 operating system. The goal
was to build an open environment rich enough to be both a good
development environment and a suitable execution environment. This meant
that the overhead needed to be small enough so that there was no
incentive to program to the native operating system directly. The
openness meant that the complete facilities of the native operating
system were accessible through this environment.
The result of this effort is a set of libraries, headers, and
utilities that we collectively refer to as UWIN. UWIN contains nearly
all the X/Open Release 4[4] headers, interfaces and commands. We discuss
alternative porting strategies, commercial products, design goals,
problems that had to be overcome, and the current status. Some
performance measurements of the current system are presented here.
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