Wouldn't it be easier to simply boot the Solaris 9 under qemu, copy the user-mode application into the environment and run it under that Solaris
9?
Maybe, but it would be nice to be able to run applications seamlessly in the host environment. With user emulator, for example host file system would be available to the emulated executable just like to a native one.
Exactly. In our case, the user-mode app we're working with makes use of the host's shared memory to simulate shared memory between multiple embedded devices. I'm not averse to re-writing that to use ethernet instead of the host's shared memory, but it'd be one less thing to re-write for this phase of our conversion.
Sorry about the cross-post. It honestly didn't occur to me that I was posting the question to the wrong list.
-Brian