Mac OS X Port of WineLib

[Marcus Meissner]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 09:56:01PM -0500, ATMRD at aol.com wrote:
>  Hi,
>      I dont recall how I stumbled upon Wine and its existance, however I am 
> intersted in recent, if any, devlopments with the porting of Wine to OS X.  I 
> checked the Wine site and most of the articles are dated with the lastest 
> date of Nov 2000.  A lot has changed in OS X since that time and it appears 
> that a leats a couple of the main issues have been addressed during this 
> time.  The main issues which seemed to be posted are as follows:

I fixed the Linux/PowerPC port. So any PowerPC processor related issue
is ok. 


> Current list of possible issues:
> ================================
> -> Endianness.  Since we are using WineLib, could
> have resources written in native (big) endian format
> with wrc.  Any external data files such as cursors, bitmaps, sound
> would have to be converted. The PUT_WORD/GET_WORD macros
> need byte swapping turned off. (Did I miss anything?)

Is ok.


> -> Exception handling, Signal handling code

Depends on MacOS X.

> -> Memory alignment issues

Should not be a problem.

> -> According to "Inside MacOS X: Kernel Environment"
>    (<A HREF="http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Kernel/KernelEnvironment.pdf">http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Kernel/KernelEnvironment.pdf</A>)
>    pg. 34, Darwin supports Pthreads, "many of the POSIX APIs"
>    I haven't been able to find any lists of incompatibilities yet,
>    but I am afraid of the word "many".

WINE needs a different kind of threading, this might be problematic.

> -> Sound Support.  Currently done with WineOSS (ties into
>    Linux OSS drivers)  Doesn't seem to be a port of OSS
>    to MacOSX.  Maybe need to do another layer specific to the
>    Mac(?)

Err, we support audio drivers and have several others non-OSS already.
No problem here, just implement a MacOS X sound driver.

> -> Must ensure that behaviour of lower level UNIX resources
>    like sockets, threads, files are the way WINE expects it.

This might be more difficult. Especially the memory management.

> -> Presence of Assembly language in code will have to be written
>    in C or translated to PowerPC assembly. (assembly is generated
>    in spec.c files, as well as other places like in the server)

Is done already, for the normal PPC32 ABI.

Good luck.

Ciao, Marcus