Longene
Longene () is a Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux. As of 1.0-rc2, it consists of a Linux kernel module implementing aspects of the Windows kernel and a modified Wine distribution designed to take advantage of the more native interface. Longene is written in the C programming language and is free and open source software. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). Although the project is in the alpha stage of development as of 2015 , many Windows programs already work well. Its official website was gone in August, but was restored in 2019. Meanwhile, the source code remains available on GitHub. Features. Longene aims to add all Windows kernel mechanisms, including system calls, Windows Registry, Windows Driver Model, Deferred Procedure Call, and others, into the Linux kernel to form a new kernel. The new kernel will allow both Linux and Windows applications and device drivers to work without virtualization or emulation. In order to prevent bloating, if a function is available in both the ReactOS and Linux kernel, the Linux implementation is used. Functions are  implemented using Linux loadable kernel modules, so they can be loaded and unloaded easily. Longene has two sets of system calls and their corresponding tables: a Windows syscall set and a Linux syscall set. Windows applications call the syscall table via software interrupt "int 0x2e". Linux applications call the syscall table via "int 0x80". The Longene project does not develop the Windows and the Linux userland libraries. Those libraries are offered by others projects, such as Wine, ReactOS, GNU, and NDISwrapper. Development. In September 2005, the Longene project gained sponsorship from Insigma Technology (浙大网新), a China-based IT consulting corporation . The project leader, Decao Mao (毛德操), proposed the idea and route of the Longene. He wrote a series of articles about the market, the intellectual property rights and the techniques to explain why people needed the project and how to implement the Longene. The articles Mao wrote were then compiled to form the white paper of the project. According to the white paper, to implement the Longene, one needs to add several parts to the Linux kernel: Development strategy. Longene uses Wine as a base for implementing the Windows API. The project re-implements Wine's modules for use as  part of the joint kernel. Longene defers from using Wine modules that have not been sufficiently implemented for the project. Versions of Longene are released when several of the Wine modules have been successfully implemented into the kernel. The new stable version will then be used as a base for implementing future modules. Windows API that have not been implemented by Wine are developed into modules from scratch. Since the Longene kernel does the work of the Windows NT kernel, Wine's own userspace kernel emulation (wineserver) is not needed. For device drivers, Longene imports NDISwrapper into the kernel. Modifications  are made to NDISwrapper for missing functionality of the Windows Driver Model using ReactOS code as a reference. The Windows Driver Kit implementation is based on ReactOS code. It uses a combination of redirecting drivers to Linux kernel resources and additional libraries that implement functions that cannot be implemented in Linux. Version history. An earlier version, unifiedkernel-2.6.13, released on February 15, 2006. This version actualized the Windows system call mechanism. Current and future development. Developers are currently working on Longene 2.0, which will support Windows applications running on non-x86 architecture hardware, such as ARM and Loongson. Additionally, the  developers are working on AMD64 support and porting NDISWrapper code to the project. Not yet implemented (but planned): Users. Magic Linux – Magic Linux is a Chinese Linux distribution based on Red Hat Linux. Version 2.1 of Magic Linux, released on December 15, 2008, includes a main version (DVD, with Linux kernel 2.6.25.20), a compact version (CD, with Linux kernel 2.6.25.20) and a Longene version (CD, with Longene 0.2.2). Hardware requirements. The minimum hardware requirements to run are: