World of Warcraft (WoW) patch/more address space layout stuff

[Mike Hearn]

On 5/30/06, n0dalus <n0dalus at gmail.com> wrote:
> It would be really great if someone could document the patch and
> explain what exactly is stopping WoW from working (as well as which
> changes would cause problems for other programs).

It's a bug in WoW itself, it relies upon the exact way NT maps memory
which is different to how Linux does it. I guess they are storing
information in the high bits of a pointer somewhere or some similar
trick.

The patch is a hack that makes Wine follow the Windows method -
unfortunately it will happily force an allocation to an area that is
already allocated. Right now it relies on pure luck to avoid blasting
a previous allocation. Expect random undebuggable failures with this
technique.

> I think there would be more chance of getting developers working on the problem if the
> problems involved were clearer and easier to see/understand.

The real issue is that it seems not many Wine developers play WoW themselves ;)

> Given the amount of users who use wine to run WoW, would it be
> possible to have the patch included with a compile-time option? Would
> it even be possible to make the patch a runtime feature?

Doubtful. You'd have to ask Alexandre. He may know of a different
solution also. Wine has a policy of not accepting application specific
hacks though there are a few generic hacks in there.

You'd be better off IMHO by preparing your own Wine binary install
that is specific to WoW itself.

thanks -mike