Running unmodified Linux executables on OSv

From the beginning, OSv has been designed to implement a subset of Linux flavor of POSIX API. But until the release 0.54.0 most Linux applications had to be re-compiled from source as shared libraries or some, like Java, rely on OSv version of /usr/bin/java wrapper to run. This meant that one could NOT run a Linux executable "as is". In other words, OSv has always been Linux-compatible at source level but not at binary level.

Starting with the release 0.54.0, it should be in general possible to run unmodified Linux position-independent executables (so-called "PIEs") and position-dependent executables "as-is" as long as they do not use "fork/execve" or other unsupported Linux API. It means that very often one can take a binary from Linux host and run it on OSv without having to locate the source code on the Internet and build it as a shared library.