Sogen – High-performance Windows and Linux userspace emulator

by fratellobigio • 1 month ago

89 25 1 month ago

very cool

wolfi12• 1 month ago

I 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

ramon156• 1 month ago

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.

momo55024• 1 month ago

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.

zx8080• 1 month ago

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.

mike_hock• 1 month ago

If the landing page is slop, just assume that the code is, too.

mentalgear2• 1 month ago

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.

homarp2• 1 month ago

on their twitter, author shows it running Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and 3:

https://xcancel.com/momo5502/status/2065872369407742398#m

https://xcancel.com/momo5502/status/2066937863162192049#m

drdexebtjl• 1 month ago

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.

wolfi12• 1 month ago

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

firebot• 1 month ago

There's literally a demo video where he uses the tool and explains everything.

momo55024• 1 month ago

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.

koolala• 1 month ago

The sandbox worked well on my phone. Seems really well made.

rounce• 1 month ago

It'd be nice if it was possible to toggle the different log classes after the fact.

momo55024• 1 month ago

That's actually possible, there is verbose, regular, concise and very concise logging. Check the help of the analyzer.

p0w3n3d• 1 month ago

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?

gavinray• 1 month ago

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

https://x.com/i/status/2066937863162192049

Bnjoroge• 1 month ago

Incredibly cool

dismanova• 1 month ago

Is there anything similar to Sogen for Android? I’m looking for a userspace/syscall-level emulator for Android native binaries.

d3Xt3r• 1 month ago

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?

gcr• 1 month ago

Yeah seconding this question, I’m very curious how this compares to wine

momo55024• 1 month ago

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

joseph2024• 1 month ago

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.

Sogen – High-performance Windows and Linux userspace emulator

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