Software to run both Windows and Linux

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Cooperative Linux

Original author(s)| Dan Aloni
Developer(s)| Community
Initial release| January 25, 2004; 19 years ago (2004-01-25)
Final release|

0.7.9 [1] / April 9, 2011; 11 years ago (2011-04-09) [1]

Operating system| Windows NT family
Type| Platform virtualization
License| GNU General Public License
Website| www.colinux.org

Cooperative Linux, abbreviated as coLinux, is software which allows Microsoft Windows and the Linux kernel to run simultaneously in parallel on the same machine.[2]

Cooperative Linux utilizes the concept of a Cooperative Virtual Machine (CVM). In contrast to traditional virtual machines, the CVM shares resources that already exist in the host OS. In traditional VM hosts, resources are virtualized for every (guest) OS. The CVM gives both OSs complete control of the host machine while the traditional VM sets every guest OS in an unprivileged state to access the real machine.

## Overview[edit]

Synaptic and nautilus running on Windows

The term "cooperative" is used to describe two entities working in parallel. In effect Cooperative Linux turns the two different operating system kernels into two big coroutines. Each kernel has its own complete CPU context and address space, and each kernel decides when to give control back to its partner.

However, while both kernels theoretically have full access to the real hardware, modern PC hardware is not designed to be controlled by two different operating systems at the same time. Therefore, the host kernel is left in control of the real hardware and the guest kernel contains special drivers that communicate with the host and provide various important devices to the guest OS. The host can be any OS kernel that exports basic primitives that allow the Cooperative Linux portable driver to run in CPL0 mode (ring 0) and allocate memory.[3]

## History[edit]

Dan Aloni originally started the development of Cooperative Linux as a research project based on similar work with User-mode Linux.[4][5] He announced the development on 25 Jan 2004.[6] In July 2004 he presented a paper at the Linux Symposium.[7] The source was released under the GNU General Public License. Other developers have since contributed various patches and additions to the software.[8]

## Comparisons[edit]

Cooperative Linux is significantly different from full x86 virtualization, which generally works by running the guest OS in a less privileged mode than that of the host kernel, and having all resources delegated by the host kernel. In contrast, Cooperative Linux runs a specially modified Linux kernel that is Cooperative in that it takes responsibility for sharing resources with the NT kernel and not instigating race conditions.

## Distribution[edit]

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Most of the changes in the Cooperative Linux patch are on the i386 tree—the only supported architecture for Cooperative at the time of this writing. The other changes are mostly additions of virtual drivers: cobd (block device), conet (network), and cocon (console). Most of the changes in the i386 tree involve the initialization and setup code. It is a goal of the Cooperative Linux kernel design to remain as close as possible to the standalone i386 kernel, so all changes are localized and minimized as much as possible.

The coLinux package installs a port of the Linux kernel and a virtual network device and can run simultaneously under a version of the Windows operating system such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP. It does not use a virtual machine such as VMware.

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Gentoo are especially popular with the coLinux users.

Due to the rather unusual structure of the virtual hardware, installing Linux distributions under coLinux is generally difficult. Therefore, users in most cases use either an existing Linux installation on a real partition or a ready made filesystem image distributed by the project. The filesystem images are made by a variety of methods, including taking images of a normal Linux system, finding ways to make installers run with the strange hardware, building up installs by hand using the package manager or simply upgrading existing images using tools like yum and apt. An easier way to get an up-to-date filesystem image is to use QEMU to install Linux and "convert" the image by stripping off the first 63 512-byte blocks as described in the coLinux wiki.

Since coLinux does not have access to native graphics hardware, X Window or X Servers will not run under coLinux directly, but one can install[citation needed] an X Server under Windows, such as Cygwin/X or Xming and use KDE or GNOME and almost any other Linux application and distribution. All of these issues are fixed by using coLinux based distributions such as andLinux, based on Ubuntu, or TopologiLinux, based on Slackware.

## Emulated hardware[edit]

* Ethernet network via TAP, PCAP, NDIS and SLiRP.

## Limitations[edit]

* Does not yet support 64-bit Windows or Linux (nor utilize more than 4GB memory), but a port is under development by the community.
* No multi-processor (SMP) support. Linux applications and the underlying kernel are able to use only one CPU.[9]

## See also[edit]

* Win32-loader
* Platform virtualization
* Comparison of platform virtualization software
* Cygwin
* MSYS
* Wubi (installer)
* Longene
* Chroot
* Windows Subsystem for Linux

## References[edit]

1. ^ a b https://www.colinux.org/?section=status
2. ^ "coLinux main website". Archived from the original on 2018-05-19. Retrieved 2004-04-13.
3. ^ "coLinux main page". Archived from the original on 2015-12-04. Retrieved 2004-04-13.`{{cite web}}`: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
4. ^ "Open source contributions | Dan Aloni". blog.aloni.org. Retrieved 2022-01-08.
5. ^ "Cooperative Linux Active Development Team Members". www.colinux.org. Retrieved 2022-01-08.
6. ^ Dan Aloni announces Cooperative Linux
7. ^ "Dan Aloni paper presented July 2004 at Linux Symposium" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-30. Retrieved 2008-03-30.
8. ^ Aloni, Dan (2021-11-17), da-x/colinux, retrieved 2022-01-08
9. ^ coLinux FAQ

## External links[edit]

* Official website
* Cooperative Linux on SourceForge
* coLinux on GitHub
* Virtualization with coLinux at the Wayback Machine (archived 2008-02-03)
* speedLinux on SourceForge
* Portable Ubuntu Remix on SourceForge

* v
* t
* e

Virtualization software

Comparison of platform virtualization software

Hardware
(hypervisors)|

| Native|

* Adeos
* CP/CMS
* Hyper-V
* KVM
* oVirt
* Red Hat Virtualization
* LDoms / Oracle VM Server for SPARC
* Logical partition (LPAR)
* LynxSecure
* PikeOS
* Proxmox VE
* QNX
* SIMMON
* VMware ESXi
* VMware vSphere
* vCloud
* VMware Infrastructure
* Xen
* Oracle VM Server for x86
* XenServer
* XtratuM
* z/VM

|

Hosted|

| Specialized|

* Basilisk II
* Bochs
* Cooperative Linux
* DOSBox
* DOSEMU
* PCem
* PikeOS
* SheepShaver
* SIMH
* Windows on Windows
* Virtual DOS machine
* Win4Lin

|

Independent|

* bhyve
* Microsoft Virtual Server
* Parallels Workstation (Extreme)
* Parallels Desktop for Mac
* Parallels Server for Mac
* PearPC
* QEMU
* VirtualBox
* Virtual Iron
* VMware Fusion
* VMware Server
* VMware Workstation (Player)
* Windows Virtual PC

Tools|

* Ganeti
* System Center Virtual Machine Manager
* Virtual Machine Manager

Operating
system|

| OS containers|

* FreeBSD jail
* iCore Virtual Accounts
* Linux-VServer
* LXC
* OpenVZ
* Solaris Containers
* Virtuozzo
* Workload Partitions

|

Application containers|

* Docker
* lmctfy
* rkt

Virtual kernel architectures|

* Rump kernel
* User-mode Linux
* vkernel

Related kernel features|

* BrandZ
* cgroups
* chroot
* namespaces
* seccomp

Orchestration|

* Amazon ECS
* Kubernetes
* OpenShift

Desktop|

* Citrix Virtual Apps
* Citrix Virtual Desktops
* Remote Desktop Services
* VMware Horizon

Application|

* Ceedo
* Citrix Virtual Apps
* Dalvik
* InstallFree
* Microsoft App-V
* Remote Desktop Services
* Symantec Workspace Virtualization
* Turbo
* VMware ThinApp
* ZeroVM

Network|

* Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE)
* Ethernet VPN (EVPN)
* NVGRE
* Open vSwitch
* Virtual security switch
* Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN)

See also|

* BlueStacks

See also: List of emulators, List of computer system emulators

* v
* t
* e

Unix–Windows interoperability

Unix-like subsystems|

* Cygwin
* Microsoft POSIX subsystem
* Windows Services for UNIX (Interix)
* Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 1)

Development environments and shells|

* DJGPP
* Hamilton C shell
* MinGW (MSYS)
* Mingw-w64 (MSYS2)
* MKS Toolkit
* PowerShell
* UWIN

Ports of Unix-like utilities for Windows|

* GnuWin32
* UnxUtils

Windows runtime environments for *nix|

* Wabi
* Willows Toolkit for UNIX
* Wine (WINE@Etersoft, Cedega, CrossOver, Darwine, Proton)

Platform virtualization software|

* Cooperative Linux
* Merge
* TopologiLinux
* Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2)

Related|

* APIW
* Captive NTFS
* NDISwrapper
* Windows Interface Source Environment

* v
* t
* e

Linux kernel

Organization|

| Kernel|

* Linux Foundation
* Linux Mark Institute
* Linus's law
* Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate
* Tux
* SCO disputes
* Linaro
* GNU GPL v2
* menuconfig
* Supported computer architectures
* Kernel names
* Criticism

|

Support|

* Developers
* The Linux Programming Interface
* kernel.org
* LKML
* Linux conferences
* Users
* Linux User Group (LUG)

Technical|

| Debugging|

* CRIU
* ftrace
* kdump
* Linux kernel oops
* SystemTap
* BPF

|

Startup|

* vmlinux
* System.map
* dracut
* initrd
* initramfs

ABIs|

* Linux Standard Base
* x32 ABI

APIs|

| Kernel|

| System Call
Interface|

* POSIX
* ioctl
* select
* open
* read
* close
* sync
* …
* Linux-only
* futex
* epoll
* splice
* dnotify
* inotify
* readahead
* …

|

In-kernel|

* ALSA
* Crypto API
* io uring
* DRM
* kernfs
* Memory barrier
* New API
* RCU
* Video4Linux
* IIO

Userspace|

| Daemons,
File systems|

* devfs
* devpts
* debugfs
* FUSE
* procfs
* sysfs
* systemd
* udev
* Kmscon

|

Wrapper
libraries|

* C standard library
* glibc
* uClibc
* Bionic
* libhybris
* dietlibc
* EGLIBC
* klibc
* musl
* Newlib
* libcgroup
* libdrm
* libalsa
* libevdev
* libusb
* liburing

Components|

* Kernel modules
* BlueZ
* cgroups
* Console
* bcache
* Device mapper
* dm-cache
* dm-crypt
* DRM
* EDAC
* evdev
* Kernel same-page merging (KSM)
* LIO
* Framebuffer
* LVM
* KMS driver
* Netfilter
* Netlink
* nftables
* Network scheduler
* perf
* SLUB
* zram
* zswap

* Process and I/O schedulers:
* O(n) scheduler
* O(1) scheduler
* Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)
* Brain Fuck Scheduler
* Noop scheduler
* SCHED_DEADLINE

* Security Modules: AppArmor
* Exec Shield
* seccomp
* SELinux
* Smack
* Tomoyo Linux
* Linux PAM

* Device drivers
* 802.11
* graphics
* Raw device

* initramfs
* KernelCare
* kexec
* kGraft
* kpatch
* Ksplice

Variants|

* Mainline
* Linux kernel
* Linux-libre
* High-performance computing
* INK
* Compute Node Linux
* SLURM
* Real-time computing
* RTLinux
* RTAI
* Xenomai
* Carrier Grade Linux
* MMU-less
* μClinux
* PSXLinux

| Virtualization|

* Hypervisor
* KVM
* Xen
* OS-level virtualization
* Linux-VServer
* Lguest
* LXC
* OpenVZ
* Other
* L4Linux
* ELinOS
* User-mode Linux
* MkLinux
* coLinux

|

Adoption|

| Range
of use|

* Desktop
* Embedded
* Gaming
* Thin client:
* LTSP
* Server:
* LAMP
* LYME-LYCE
* Devices

|

Adopters|

* List of Linux adopters
* GENIVI Alliance
* Proprietary software for Linux

* Linux portal
* Free and open-source software portal
* Category

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