headless question, and IPC question

[Kuba Ober]

On Sunday 25 September 2005 05:37, 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

Your .exe can make regular linux syscalls as it's really running on linux. So 
you can essentially do whatever a regular linux application would, given 
constraints enforced by wine's signal handling and such. But all simple 
things like opening a pipe, using ipc() call etc will work. The only thing is 
that you need to code syscall() and a couple of wrappers for specific 
syscalls you want to use, but that's a simple matter and glibc sources are a 
reasonable reference for that.

Cheers, Kuba