Does (or can) Wine use SMP?

[Daniel Foesch]

Spectre wrote:

>I mainly run dual processor machines and was wondering if multi
>processors helped or was ignored.
>
>(Yes, I am a Linux/Wine newbie, but I am trying to figure my (other)
>system limitations.)
>
>I would assume that if the original program didn't use or wasn't
>written for multi-processor systems it will only use one, even with
>"the system" seeing and using both.(?)
>
>I am curious about this and was hoping others with more experience
>could help me out.
>

I was in your same position awhile ago.  Actually, I was a fledgling with Linux
and WINE when I started going to SMP, and I asked this question as one of my
first questions.  The responses that I got were basicly:

Linux supports SMP by supporting POSIX threads, which due to standards require
that they can be run on any processor.  Linux's processes are just really POSIX
threads with a process ID number.  This makes things a lot simpler, because
more things are actually the same thing.

WINE supports SMP to the extent that if the application is designed to be
multi-threaded, WINE will start a seperate (process/thread) for each, and thus
the application can (will) be run SMP.  Now, this helps very little with
applications that are not designed to run SMP at all (win9x programs, since SMP
is not supported at all)

My empirical evidence is that most programs that I came across, and ran under
WINE were not at all multi-threaded, but then because the chief comsumer
Windows OS is the 9x series, no one has really bothered to think "what if it's
an SMP system?" So, me being the typical consumer; I had no programs that
exploited the SMP much if at all.

I did notice though that most of my hard-drive accesses were made somewhat
multi-threaded (but then I have software RAID, that's probably part of it) 
Also, most of my applications seem to jump processors, and because of that, I
have noticed minor, and in other places significant speed-ups when running only
a single processor as opposed to the two I had before. (except for, of course
the ubiquitous make)

So... basicly it all boils down to: you're generally right in your thinking,
and I hope you luck in finding multi-threaded windows programs to use.

Daniel "Krach" Foesch
---------------------
"I'm all in favor of regulations dictating a standard placement of directions
on frozen foods" -Lyle McCracken