This is a note for any developers of openssl-based products on win32 platforms. Due to some mild curiosity recently, I tried running a win32 build of openssl libs and utils under Wine[1] to see what problems there might be.
As it turns out things are pretty smooth with the libraries, the one exception was that some of the PRNG-seeding techniques were crashing on some unimplemented win32 API functions so I've sent in some stubs for those that have since been applied to wine CVS. With respect to the openssl binary utilities (openssl.exe and friends), one of the wine developers managed to fix a couple of bugs openssl highlighted in its console behaviour, so this is now working fine too. So as far as I can tell, there should be no remaining problems using openssl win32 libs or executables under Wine. The current release should already have these fixes incorporated, though otherwise it's certain the next release will. If any of you have considered or tried running your own win32 applications/products under Wine rather than porting them to glibc/gtk/etc, you may have already abandoned this possibility due to OpenSSL's use of these missing APIs. If it's not too late to do so, you should consider trying this out again, it may just work. :-) If you haven't tried this before and your product only supports the windows platforms, it could be very helpful to you, the Wine project, and open source causes in general to check out how well your product works under Wine. If there are any issues, they can usually be diagnosed quickly when the authors of the programs concerned are cooperating with the debugging efforts, and all such efforts go to improve the overall win32 compatibility of Wine and its ability to give users of win32 programs a meaningful alternative to MS windows. I will provide all the help I can to anyone trying to Q/A their win32 crypto/SSL applications under Wine, and there are many active Wine developers who are also likely to welcome and help anyone who's willing to accompany some new win32 test cases through the required testing. So, anyone out there with win32 programs they want to try on Wine? Cheers, Geoff [1] FYI: wine (from www.winehq.org) is an implementation of win32 binary-loading and the system DLLs that allow win32 programs to execute natively on *nix platforms. Roughly speaking, the wine binary loader does to win32 "PE" executables and libraries what the linux binary loader (ld.so) does for native "ELF" executables and libraries. The Wine "DLLs" are equivalents for their MS windows counterparts, and are usually built as native shared-libraries on the host platform. In essence, the main difference between running win32 applications under Wine/*nix instead of windows, apart from any unfinished work in Wine itself or unreproduced bugs from windows, is what the underlying kernel is. On both platforms the loader, linker, and API shared libraries do "equivalent" jobs, and performance of applications should be more or less comparable in most cases (with only a few exceptions heavily favouring one platform or the other). The main thing to remember w.r.t. any performance fears is the acronym; "WINE", Wine Is Not an Emulator. :-) -- Geoff Thorpe [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.geoffthorpe.net/ ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
