headless question, and IPC question

[Alex Villací­s Lasso]

Ken Larson wrote:

> I'm using wine to access a particular proprietary DLL (I don't have 
> the source for it) on Linux.  The way I'm doing this is to write an 
> EXE that wraps the DLL, and makes all of the functions available via 
> socket request and response messages.  My linux program has access to 
> the functions of the DLL by sending socket messages to the EXE running 
> under wine.  2 questions:
>
> 1. My DLL/EXE uses no calls to pop up graphical windows, so 
> theoretically no display is needed.  Of course wine needs a display 
> because it does not know that an EXE won't make such calls.  Is there 
> a way to run wine with a null or dummy display - so that it is 
> effectively running headless?
>
> 2. The sockets trick was the simplest way I could figure out how to do 
> IPC between a linux process and a wine process.  However, is there are 
> any better or faster way to do this?  As far as I know I can't use 
> winelib because I don't have the source to the DLL.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ken Larson
>
>
>
If your program is a console-only app, it can run without an X server. 
For example, the command "regedit /?" works without defining a DISPLAY 
variable, even in a text console. If you write interesting information 
to a logfile instead of the screen, you could even do "wine wrapper.exe 
&" on the shell and put your app in the background.

About winelib, you could try making a winelib app that loads the DLL 
dynamically. But this would only work for a true DLL (for example 
"propietary.dll") on which you can call LoadLibrary(). If your library 
is a static one such as "propietary.lib", with no companion DLL file to 
load, then all the interesting code is in the LIB file itself and cannot 
be loaded dynamically.

About faster communication, you could try running the Linux app, which 
would fork(). One process runs your GUI or sets up your service, and the 
other could then exec() the winelib wrapper. Before the fork, you should 
set up a pair of pipes, or use socketpair() for communication. If you 
are careful, this can even work for a pure Windows app linked with a 
static LIB file, by connecting your pipe/socket to the stdin/stdout of 
the wine process (see the manpage on dup2() for details).

Hope this helps.

Alex Villacís Lasso