WINE vs. FreeBSD

[Kip Macy]

Thanks for your input.

The relative merits of the different threading libraries is currently
under discussion. Could you also try it with libthr (it may not work
at all), I'd like to hear what happens. Thanks.

   -Kip

On 7/22/06, Michael Nottebrock <lofi at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 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               | lofi at freebsd.org
>  (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
>    \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
>
>