Help needed

[Patrik Stridvall]

I'm sorry for not answering earlier.
I saw your message but I didn't have time to
answer it at the time and then a forgot about it.

In truth I wasn't very eager about answering either since
I have answered far to many people that just asked questions
and then didn't contribute anything because I guess that
they felt it was to difficult or to much work.

I didn't notice that you were from Digital either,
but after reading Kernel Cousin Wine #97 I was made
aware of that fact. 

While it is possible that you are yet another of those
people I talked about above, since you are from Digital
I will take some time to answer your questions.

Note however that I'm not at all unwilling to answer questions.
It is just that it has felt like a wasted effort in the past.

> We are planning to port wine onto Tru64 Unix. I have some 
> basic Questions.

OK. Sound good.

> Can you tell me how to go about it. 

Yes. But it is better if you ask more specific questions.

> How do we start. 

You try to get it to compile and link.
This shouldn't be to difficult.
While I never used Tru64 I expect it
supports all things Wine will need.

> How big 
> is the task and

Well, if you want the emulator (Wine) to work it
will be a humongous task, since you will have to
emulate x86 instructions on the Alpha among other
things.

However if you just want the porting tool (Winelib)
to work it will be a little easier.

Still, you must be aware of a few thing.
* Wine is not 100% byte order clean.
  However there have been some attempts to
  port it to Sparc which is big endian so
  don't if I think it is that bad and
  the remaining problems can be fixed without
  to much effort.
* Wine is not 64 bit clean.
  This is a little worse especially since
  Win32 often stores pointers in 32 bit integers
  and this problem really can't be solved in
  a good way, since extending the size of the storage
  is not possible at least not if you want to
  be able to implement a x86 emulator in the
  future. However I guess it will be possible
  to force all memory usage to be in the lower
  32 bits of memory to be able to cope with
  truncated pointers.
* Then of course you have Tru64 specific problem.
  However I don't expect them to be so bad.

> how to start about it..

Well as I said. Try to compile and link it.
Then try to get some of the simple examples
in wine/programs to run.