Wine & non X86 processors

Francois Gouget fgouget at free.fr
Tue Jan 8 18:22:56 CST 2002


On Tue, 8 Jan 2002, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:

> Hi,
>
> A friend of mine who uses sparc machine wants to write a pentium emulator &
> use wine with it to run some apps...
>
> His question is - are there any special notes about wine in big endian? does
> he need to make lots of changes? if so, in whats parts in general?

   Note that if his intention is to run Windows applications, i.e. x86
applications, with Wine on Sparc, there are many more issues than just
compiling Wine on Sparc.
   For instance you will have to convert all the data structures (e.g.
messages) between little and big endian format each time you switch
between Wine and the application. You will also need to properly invoke
the emulator each time Wine invokes a callback. Some applications also
expect to be able to 'communicate' with the OS via interrupts, or other
very low level things and you will need a very tight integration between
the emulator and Wine to implement that. All this will require
widespread modifications in Wine's code.
   If you want to run x86 windows applications on Sparc, your best bet
is to run Wine itself in the CPU emulator. This way you don't even need
to worry about porting Wine to Sparc.


   If on the other hand he wants to use Winelib to port Windows
applications to Sparc then he does not need a CPU emulator at all.



--
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                           La terre est une bêta...





More information about the wine-devel mailing list