Future implementation

[Michael Stefaniuc]

Damjan Jovanovic wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 6:35 AM, Luis Busquets
> <luis.busquets at ilidium.com> wrote:
>> Could someone please confirm the following points?:
>>
> 
>> 2. Integration of DosBOX or other emulator. How this will be done? Is the
>> plan to use them when wine detects that the programme is compiled for real
>> mode? Does that mean that the sake of wine is to provide compatibility only
>> for applications built to be run on protected mode?
>>
> 
> Just yesterday (http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-April/082983.html)
> I wrote that we don't need emulation even on 64-bit since we can still
> get into virtual 8086 mode using the http://v86-64.sourceforge.net
> project.
And yesterday ;) I wanted to reply that Wine cannot rely on that
feature. That stuff is a kernel patch in the early stage. Provided that
Linus is willing to accept that feature it is at least 2 kernel versions
out; I see it earliest in 2.6.36 aka 1 year from now. And it will take
another 6-12 month until that feature is generally available in Linux
distributions. Also the non-Linux OSes would need to provide a similar
functionality too.

> In any case, a real mode DOS application can still switch into
> protected mode, and a 16-bit protected mode Windows 3.1 application
> can still call into DOS, so there's no escape from DOS in Wine :-).
16bit Windows applications do run in Wine on a 64bit OS without any need
for VM86.

bye
	michael