Mac OS X/Darwin port of Wine

[Francois Gouget]

On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Michael F. March wrote:
[...]
> > Once you can run Linux/x86 application like Mozilla with acceptable
> > performance in Bochs on MacOS X you should be able to run applications
> > such as Word in Wine with similar performance. Similarly, once Linux/x86
> > Gimp runs with acceptable performance in Bochs on MacOS X you can run
> > Photoshop in Wine with similar performance (well, once it runs in Wine
> > that is).
>
> Wine should be able to achieve  greater performance than Bochs on
> the same system configuration. IIRC, WABI sent only 25% of its cycles
> emulating X86 instructions, the rest of the API calls were implemented
> and executed in native mode. In Bochs case, it spends 100% of its time
> emulating X86 instructions.

Not really. My understanding of it is that the system libraries (C
library, X libraries, etc.) would be native MacOS X libraries (or at
least PPC libraries). Thus even running Wine in Bochs would execute
native PPC code something like 50% of the time.

By converting Wine's libraries so they are native PPC libraries you can
save the extra 25% or so but only at the cost of tremendously increased
complexity. I think it would be much harder than improvinig the
performance of Bochs by implementing things such as just-in0time
compiling (note I don't know exactly what optimisations Bochs already
has).

Furthermore this is all assuming that your application spends most of
its time executing code in Wine dlls or system libraries. This is most
likely to be wrong for applications such as Photoshop, all games, and
even to some extent Access or Excel (depends how you use these).

Thus, IMHO, improving the performance of Bochs and sticking to running
Windows applications in Wine in Bochs is the best approach for now. Once
Bochs is highly optimized, then it will be worth considering integrating
it in Wine as a way to squeeze a few extra percents of performance... if
it proves necessary.

Plus, making it possible to run any Linux/x86 application on MacOS X has
benefits beyond Wine that should not be neglected.


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Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
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