<div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="Wj3C7c"><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Chris Robinson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:chris.kcat@gmail.com" target="_blank">chris.kcat@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>On Monday 16 February 2009 9:38:19 am Seth Shelnutt wrote:<br>
> I had an interesting thought the other day, and that is to having some<br>
> built in support for forwarding windows dlls to linux .so's.<br>
<br>
</div>IIRC, this kind of thing is generally discouraged, except in cases where<br>
needed (eg. opengl32). Part of the problem is internal differences.. for<br>
example, what would a Linux .so do if it's given a Win32 filename path? Other<br>
problems would be if the Linux equivalent wants a Window for a function<br>
argument and the DLL wants an HWND instead, or if the DLL has more/different<br>
functions (eg. CUDA on Win32 has functions for dealing with D3D objects; CUDA<br>
on Linux doesn't, and it wouldn't be straight forward to even implement them<br>
through wined3d).<br>
<br>
Something like OpenGL, and even OpenAL to some degree, would directly benefit<br>
from having the DLLs forwarded to their host equivalents as it provides better<br>
access to the hardware and better integration with the host system. Something<br>
like zlib or ogg/vorbis and stuff wouldn't though, since the code should<br>
largely be the same, and save for some bugs/inefficiencies in Wine (which<br>
should be fixed), would work identically.<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div><br></div></div><div>Does Wine yet have the capability to interface with HAL for Win32 hardware access similar to NT? It looks like it doesn't from all this talk of forwarding DLLs. What we should do instead of trying to forward DLLs, which is asking for more trouble than its worth, is try to get the NT layer to connect to UNIX HAL so that DLLs can link directly to HAL and operate the hardware.</div>
</div><br>