Noob question: Can you run Linux Software on BSD? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- soadsob · 2018-11-13 10:55 Hi all, I've read that it there is some kind of linux emulation in BSD. Does this mean I can just run normal linux software on it? Are there any restrictions? ​ I'm just curious and really appreciate your help! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- urglecom · 2018-11-13 11:02 If the software in question is open source, then there is a good chance that it has been ported to the BSDs already (especially if it's popular or avoids features that are only available in linux). If the software hasn't been ported then there is a good chance that linux binaries will run under linux emulation in the BSDs. However, it might make use of linux features that are not present in the emulation or make assumptions about the rest of the system that aren't true. So the answer is "yes, probably". If you have a specific example in mind, then we can advise on that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- illumosguy · 2018-11-13 11:16 OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD do not provide binary emulation any longer though, so this applies to NetBSD and FreeBSD only ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FUZxxl · 2018-11-13 13:09 FreeBSD provides support for all system calls of Linux 2.6.38. Many video games work fine with that. The ports contain packages from CentOS 7 as a runtime environment. That said, you often need to copy all shared libraries a program needs from Linux before being able to run it on FreeBSD. This can be annoying at times and requires a little bit of experience. Refer to [the handbook](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html) for an introduction. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- antipop_superstar · 2018-11-13 14:06 If you can build it on BSD, you can run it. The hard part is getting it to build, but your chosen BSD's ports and packages system may already have binary packages prebuilt for you, or at least provide a path toward building the app yourself. Don't count on Electron support happening any time soon, though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- daemonpenguin · 2018-11-13 18:03 In short: "no". Linux software doesn't "just" run on FreeBSD. However, most Linux software has been ported to FreeBSD. So if you want to run Firefox, VLC, LibreOffice, etc then you can install the FreeBSD versions of those packages. And there is a compatibility layer, but it only works for older Linux executables and takes some tinkering to set up. so you might get some old games or binary-only programs working, but don't expect newer software like Chrome or Steam to run. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- xmjEE · 2018-11-14 04:43 >FreeBSD provides support for all system calls of Linux 2.6.38. Do we do epoll/inotify these days? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cmason37 · 2018-11-15 17:17 IIRC FBSD 12 introduced epoll.