Wine kernel acceleration module?

Shachar Shemesh wine-devel at sun.consumer.org.il
Sun Jan 19 04:09:44 CST 2003


Francois Gouget wrote:

>So you're better of with the kernel module if the bug is in the
>application, and you're better of with shm if the bug is in the server.
>Then it's a matter of which one is more likely.
>
I'm not in front of the sources at the moment. How big is the wineserver 
at the moment?

If it's rather big (and I rather suspect it is), then it seems obvious 
which one is more likely. The windows apps are released apps that were 
working on Windows NT. The wineserver, on the other hand, is a piece of 
Alpha software that has not seen too much pounding into. I think that a 
bug in the server is MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to happen.

I think the best approach is a hybrid one. We have a kernel module that 
does only the bare minimum required in the kernel. Everything else is 
done using user-mode processes. This has several important advantages:

   1. Bugs are much less likely to happen in the kernel area - less
      chances of blowing the entire machine away.
   2. It becomes much easier to port the kernel to other platforms.
   3. You can still, basically, do everything you did with a full
      fledged kernel wineserver.
   4. Rebooting wine does not require rebooting the kernel (machine), or
      even unloading and reloading the kernel module.

It is even, theoretically, possible to run several wineservers this way, 
though I'm not sure enough of the fine details to say that for sure.

                Shachar





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