[Wine] Re: Run linux binaries on Windows

[oiaohm]

David Gerard yes doing irix is hard.  It has a really strange elf usage compared to everything else and a lot of extra syscalls.

Doing Linux binaries under Windows makes doing irix under NetBSD look like a walk in the park.  Ie simple.

I did not go near syscalls.  Another area of difference.

Linux and Windows NT syscalls have almost nothing in common.  Right down to using a completely different syscall interface interpert. 

Lucky for wine is windows NT is design that basically almost no program does syscalls directly instead uses ntdll.dll to perform syscall for them.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Kernel these are still working on the idea of using windows syscalls with Linux.   Notice this is a kernel mode alteration.

At the start Linux Unified Kernel run into many issues with the Linux kernel that were causing them no end of problems implementing.   Lot turned to be Linux kernel design flaws getting in way.   But as Linux kernel itself has evolved more and more of these issues has disappeared.

Big thing at the start Linux Unified Kernel could alter the linux kernel source were required so they could get somewhere.

Part of the complexity doing it on windows is that the OS is closed source as well.  So you cannot patch over things either.  Same is true with Linux Unified Kernel and patching the Reactos Kernel.  Some alterations broke the compatibility Linux had with some of its own applications with performance and so on. 

Turing logic never ruled out the existence of creating incompatible logic systems.   Both systems may do logic may get equal results.

Big advantage implementing windows in Linux is that Linux kernel is technically more advanced with a far more complete list of features compare to a Windows kernel.

Sorry to say no matter how you cut it daxue running Linux stuff on windows is a uphill battle.  You are going to hit walls that cannot be changed in a simple and clean way.

Not supporting particular memory operations natively forces the usage of independant memory manager by colinux.

Even worse of MS is they cannot legally implement lot of the features the Linux kernel has in memory management.   Reason they are patented by companies like IBM and Vmware.  Companies MS have double crossed in the course of doing business so not likely to give their patents way cheaply.   Linux is allowed legally since it open source and it used by these companies with there products to use a lot of patents at no cost.  Complete different matter for MS.

There are many factor against it working.   Patents are bad for everyone closed and open source alike.   MS was too stupid to see this.  MS presumed that open source would not be able to afford to take out patents.   Big big mistake.  The users of open source could afford to take out patents and some of them like IBM are highly experienced at it.

Accept daxue there is no way forward on the Windows platform to run Linux stuff perfectly.   There will be a way at some point to run Windows stuff perfectly on Linux.   It is only time.  Linux has the feature set of the kernel on it side to emulate windows.