David Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> With a little work, Wine could probably have most of the functionality of
> Win4Lin. For one thing, the Wine krnl386/kernel32 needs to be rock solid
> (which I am not so sure of right now). For another thing, GDI needs to be
> able to run natively. USER already does run natively, and the only thing
> left is getting all the VxDs right (which is another chore).
>
> About a month ago I toyed with the idea of a native GDI, and from what I
> have seen on this list, it should be possible simply by implementing a
> proper display driver. So does anyone have any objections if I go ahead and
> see if I can hack something out for a DISPLAY driver? Will more work need
> to be done to get GDI to work right (for instance, does GDI make assumptions
> about kernel or the VxDs loaded that simply cannot be implemented in Wine)?
We can probably make native GDI work, but I'm not sure we want
to. Wine's strength is that it doesn't depend on native dlls and thus
can do things at an higher abstraction level; this allows us to do
stuff like -managed mode, which I think everyone will agree is better
than -desktop. Ultimately I hope that we can also support Qt/GTK for
even smoother integration in the Linux desktop.
While native GDI would of course be optional, I think supporting it
would add constraints on the rest of the code that would prevent doing
some more interesting things; the native USER support is already
imposing unnecessary contraints, and will probably get broken by
address space separation anyway.
--
Alexandre Julliard
[EMAIL PROTECTED]