Windows mobile and ARM

[Steven Edwards]

Hi Scott,

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 1:39 AM, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
> Is it at all feasible to run Windows mobile apps under Wine?  From what
> I understand it's supposed to be largely the same API as standard Win32.
>
> How about a port to ARM for the purpose of running Windows Mobile apps,
> or just recompiled Winelib apps?

I've played with this a bit from time to time and while not an expert,
I can provide an overview of what its going to take.

 - winelib might have some problems due to alignment asumptions in the
existing code
 - of course winelib/wineserver/ntdll/etc need to have arm support added
 - prior to WinCE 4? I think the address space for each app was like
32Mb. With the current versions it has more of a normal win32 like
layout with a 2GB private space. The reserved areas in its memory
manager also differ than the normal win32 memory layout
 - threading is different on WinCE than it is on normal Win32. I think
there may be asumptions
in Wine code that would cause problems with existing windows mobile apps
 - You will need to implement the runtime libraries. It does not use
user32/gdi32/kernel32 and friends but uses corelib.dll I think. I sent
in a stub for this a long time ago and was able to get a really simple
WinCE app to work under ReactOS using it. Wine was not as forgiving at
the time.

> Ubuntu is getting serious about its ARM port, so if Wine/ARM becomes a
> reality within the next, say, 2 years the potential for quickly
> developing mobile applications by just porting Windows ones is huge.
> Theoretically, we could run Windows applications on a jailbroken iPhone.

If you want to start now, we could try getting X86 WinCE apps working,
that would get a good bit of the infrastructure in place for
supporting Arm based WinCE and Windows Mobile.


-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo