Sogen – High-performance Windows and Linux userspace emulator

62 pointsposted 3 days ago
by fratellobigio

16 Comments

wolfi1

8 hours 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

momo5502

2 hours 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.

ramon156

7 hours 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.

momo5502

2 hours 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.

drdexebtjl

2 hours 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.

zx8080

7 hours 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.

firebot

2 hours ago

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

mike_hock

6 hours ago

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

p0w3n3d

5 hours 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?

rounce

5 hours ago

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

koolala

5 hours ago

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