Sogen – High-performance Windows and Linux userspace emulator
sogen.devI don't like these landing pages which explain nothing. does it emulate windows under linux and vice versa? then it definitely would be very interesting if it just sandboxes applications in the respective OS it could still be useful but has less advantages
Hey, author here, I agree with you. Landing page is shit. I will rework it, but at the moment, I'm rather focusing on improving the project itself.
To answer your actual question, it does both. It emulates both windows and linux (although linux implementation was done by a contributor and it's probably not as evolved as the windows part). It also does so on every platform, so you can emulate windows on your android/ios phone, even on the web. It cross compiles to pretty much every platform.
It supports various emulation backends, e.g. Unicorn (which uses QEMU under the hood), but also Hyper-V on windows. That's where the sandboxing part comes in to play: As Hyper-V is pretty fast, the emulator starts turning into a sandbox.
Maybe some day I can add KVM support so you can run sandboxed Windows apps on Linux, but I haven't had the time yet. So at the moment, only the slow emulation backends work on Linux.
I love when LLMs add stats that do not convey anything
> 2 OS targets
Well yeah..
Edit: I would like to add that I checked out the GH and it seems like a really cool project, hence it's a shame that the website did not reflect that.
I gladly accept pull request. I'm bad at webdesign and I'm not that big of a fan of AI generated pages (although I gotta admit I AI generated the landing page; hence I'm not a big fan of it). So if you have inspiration on how to improve it, especially on how to better present the project, feel free to tell me, or create a PR.
> I don't like these landing pages which explain nothing.
But they are not for you! They apparently help to appear on the HN frontpage.
And probably also winning some ~sponsor~ investor money.
As usual, the repo (https://github.com/momo5502/sogen) should be the HN link.
On first look of the linked talk/demo, the German guy behind the project seems of legit DRM-background expertise.
on their twitter, author shows it running Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and 3:
Being able to run any windows productivity app on any other OS would be a game changer ! Did you investigate this?
it requires 'the actual ntdll, kernel32 and user32, not reimplemented stubs.
So it's unclear how would that work from a licensing PoV
Respectfully, maybe you’re not the target audience? I think I understood it immediately.
It’s a debugging/reverse engineering tool. It emulates user space, so it can control/introspect the target processes to the same level that a kernel-level debugger could, but in user space.
that was not my question, my question was, if i could run windows programs under linux or vice versa, that was not clear to me and this wasn't answered by you as well, fortunately the original author clarified this
There's literally a demo video where he uses the tool and explains everything.
If the landing page is slop, just assume that the code is, too.
Twitter has videos of the author running Call of Duty MW2/3 that popped up on my feed organically recently
Apparently even multi-player works which i find impressive
It is incredible! It is amazing that they implemented the Windows kernel yourself. It is also similar to gvisor in that it is a userspace kernel. I am curious about the process of making this.
Is there anything similar to Sogen for Android? I’m looking for a userspace/syscall-level emulator for Android native binaries.
So, can this be used as an alternative to Wine? Can I run games with it? And when/why should I use this instead of Wine?
Running games is currently WIP, but it's making a lot of progress. Compared to wine, this fully sandboxes the process. So no intended way for an attacker to escape and e.g. access files on your PC, if the game is vulnerable, compared to wine
Yeah seconding this question, I’m very curious how this compares to wine
That's quite a thing. I wonder how can it be used, providing that most apps for windows are GUI. Maybe serving an old C# app?
It'd be nice if it was possible to toggle the different log classes after the fact.
That's actually possible, there is verbose, regular, concise and very concise logging. Check the help of the analyzer.
The sandbox worked well on my phone. Seems really well made.
Incredibly cool
very cool