headless question, and IPC question

[Ken Larson]

Kuba Ober wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
This assumes that I'm using winelib, correct?  (I currently am not, I'm 
compiling on windows, but considering using winelib instead)

Thanks,

Ken