In software engineering , a compatibility layer is an interface that allows binaries for a legacy or foreign system to run on a host system. This translates system calls for the foreign system into native system calls for the host system. With some libraries for the foreign system, this will often be sufficient to run foreign binaries on the host system. A hardware compatibility layer consists of tools that allow hardware emulation .
4-526: Dalvik Turbo was created as a proprietary compatibility layer alternative to Google 's implementation of the Dalvik virtual machine that runs on the Android operating system and other platforms. It was originally developed by French/Swiss firm Myriad Group . Dalvik Turbo has an alternative version which runs on non-Android platforms, Sailfish OS , which is known as Alien Dalvik . The virtual machine runs
8-542: A compatibility layer can be quite intricate and troublesome; a good example is the IRIX binary compatibility layer in the MIPS architecture version of NetBSD . A compatibility layer requires the host system's CPU to be (upwardly) compatible to that of the foreign system. For example, a Microsoft Windows compatibility layer is not possible on PowerPC hardware because Windows requires an x86 CPU. In this case full emulation
12-591: The Java platform on compatible mobile devices, and it can also run applications which have been converted into a compact Dalvik Executable ( .dex ) bytecode format for lower end devices. In 2011, MIPS Technologies entered into a license agreement with Myriad to make their Dalvik Turbo Virtual Machine (VM) available to its licensees as part of its standard distribution of Android for its MIPS architecture . Compatibility layer Examples include: Compatibility layer in kernel : A compatibility layer avoids both
16-410: The complexity and the speed penalty of full hardware emulation . Some programs may even run faster than the original, e.g. some Linux applications running on FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer may perform better than the same applications on Red Hat Linux. Benchmarks are occasionally run on Wine to compare it to Windows NT-based operating systems. Even on similar systems, the details of implementing
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