When will Wine integrate an x86 CPU emulator?

[Anand Kumria]

Jim,

On Fri, 22 Aug 2003 12:41:42 +1000, Jim White wrote:

> Francois Gouget wrote:
>> On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Ulrich Weigand wrote: [...]
>> 
>>>The only reason for wanting to integrate an emulator into Wine is that
>>>this would allow to run the Wine components natively, and only switch
>>>to the emulator for executing Windows binaries.
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> Not only it would be extremely complex but I am not even sure it would
>> be more efficient.
>> ...
>> How does that apply to the emulator case? Well, let's take InflateRect:
>> ...
> 
> I don't understand why you put effort into shooting down strawmen.  If
> you are not interested in a version of Wine incorporating an x86
> emulator then that's just dandy.
> 
> The point of integrating the x86 emulation is not necessarily to get
> into the interface between Wine and the Windows applications.  The point
> is to avoid a whole layer of OS emulation.  

There is no layer of OS emulation if you use an x86 emulator. An example
of an x86 emulator is QEMU. You run "qemu wine <windows program>" and
that is it.

You seem to be thinking that an x86 system emulator (e.g. VMware,
VirtualPC, Bochs, etc.) is required. They aren't.

> Consider Mac OS X.  Using Wine for x86/Linux means running a second OS
> under emulation

No, it doesn't. 

> And especially attractive from the x86 emulator's standpoint is the
> ability to identify read-only code resources with defined entry points
> that can be JIT compiled to native code rather than simply
> interpreting.

Which is exactly what QEMU does. QEMU already works on PowerPC hardware.
<URL: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/>. All that is needed is for
someone with access to port it to Mac OS X.

That someone could be you, and you'd have achieved what you want.

Anand