Wine Traffic #61 For 18 Sep 2000

As far as porting Wine, I think the consensus is that it's probably not worth it, due to performance issues. If anyone wishes to do this, though (especially for Alpha), Compaq has told me that they would be willing to release a free run time of their x86 emulator, so that this could be done at high speeds. Ulrich also did a good deal of work on this.

As far as Winelib, I think the belief is that porting to a non x86, Unix with X Windows should be fairly straightforward. There will be a fair amount of work to find and remove all of the unknown bugs with byte endianness and packing, but the fundamental design and plan for Wine is to make this easy.

For non Unix and/or non X Windows systems (such as BeOS and MacOS), it gets a little bit harder. BeOS seems to be much harder because it is missing many systems calls that Wine relies upon (Patrik is the expert on Be, and I believe there is a web page dedicated to Wine on BeOS). MacOS <= 9 is similarly hard.

MacOS X, however, is another story. If you get an X server on MacOS X, it should be pretty easy. If you want to do it the right way, you'd need to develop a Carbon driver to parallel the Wine x11 driver. That, while conceptually straightforward, will be a lot of work.

I got some simple winelib apps up and running on LinuxPPC in early 1999, but it was fairly hackish, and most of my changes didn't make it into the mainline WINE tree. I did some work updating the port for newer releases of LinuxPPC at MacHack this summer, but got stuck trying to figure out how to properly deal with the thread local storage. My old code still works ok though, if you happen to have a LinuxPPC machine around.

The main Wine tree doesn't compile out of the box. There's still a few problems, mostly related to alignment issues, that I haven't yet fixed in a clean way.

On machines without alignment constraints (even if big-endian), there shouldn't be much changes necessary. For example, just for fun I tried to get Wine to compile on S/390; it took me only a few hours until WineMine was running ...

• Locking: at some point I will need to add locking code for MT safety. Are there any issues (performance?) I need to be aware of using the win32 locking functions in the dll?
• Thread-safe: MS docs state that crtdll is not very thread-safe, however I can't see any reason why wines shouldn't be. I don't think any apps depend on non thread-safe behavior since by definition it is unpredictable. So I think it may be worthwhile to make it MT safe. This would mean a large part of the code could be shared with msvcrt.dll (way in the future).
• #includes: Wine's "process.h" will conflict with the crt "process.h". Is it desirable to have crt headers in the wine include dir, or should they be in include/crt? (note I wont be writing headers for some time).

We're going to try to cut over the mailing lists from the old server to the new server today. Hopefully, we will be able to not lose subscription info etc. The current plan is to change over to using majordomo at the same time -- I'll provide some details once it's done.