Dear -hackers and -emulation readers, I would like to call your attention to a few long-standing problems that have so far prevented WINE from living up to its capabilities on FreeBSD.
I am afraid that I still don't fully grasp the scope of the problem, nor do I have a clear idea of what the solution might be, but what I've gathered so far is this: WINE does have certain requirements regarding memory allocation. In particular it (or Windows, rather) really wants a few memory ranges for itself: (from wine-0.9.17/loader/preloader.c): * 0x00000000 - 0x00110000 the DOS area * 0x80000000 - 0x81000000 the shared heap * ??? - ??? the PE binary load address (usually starting at 0x00400000) The first two are particularly important for WINE running in win98 (or earlier) emulation mode, which is currently completely broken on FreeBSD, since those two memory ranges tend to be unavailable. The preloader bit from which this is quoted is WINE's "own shared object loader that reserves memory that is important to Wine, and then loads the main binary and its ELF interpreter", and obviously does not work right on FreeBSD. I'm not sure whether it can be made to or not, perhaps somebody familiar with both our VM and runtime linker could take a look. Some more references: http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2004-December/031750.html http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5732 The other big issue with WINE on FreeBSD seems to be our threading support. WINE quite reliably manages to confuse libpthread, see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=threads/100701. On SMP machines, I've even been able to trigger kernel panics with WINE (in win2k+ emulation mode) by merely hitting the close button on a windows application (and WINE subsequently shutting down): http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2006-June/026219.html. WINE's threads interface can be found in loader/pthread.c and loader/kthread.c - again, it would be great, if someone to whom that sort of code means more than just random gibberish could take a look. Cheers, -- ,_, | Michael Nottebrock | [EMAIL PROTECTED] (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve | http://www.freebsd.org \u/ | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
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