[Wine] Replacing X11 backend driver with SDL

Roger Cruz roger_r_cruz at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 22 09:27:42 CDT 2011


My comments embedded below with >>


From: vitamin <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
To: wine-users at winehq.org
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2011 11:13 PM
Subject: [Wine] Re: Replacing X11 backend driver with SDL

>> I understand it won't be a drop-in replacement for X11 but my idea is to have a winesdl.drv
>> which provides the exact functionality Wine expects from the winex11.drv.   It may require
>> more coding and calls into SDL to generate the same graphics and input as X11 provides
>> but that will all be abstracted by the winesdl.drv.
>> Basically, I am looking to run Wine on a system which has no X11 subsystem but has
>> an SDL stack. 
rogercruz wrote:
> 2) Does such a SDL driver exist or know of anyone who has worked on it but never made it into Wine?

No, and afaik no one even tried. Wine's X11 driver is far more complex than most people think.

>> Oh yeah, I'm not minimizing the amount of work that would be required.  I am only looking
>> to hear if it is technically feasible or whether i am overlooking some obvious technical problem
>> that would prevent Wine from working with an SDL backend.. something like Wine requires
>> a particular shader which can't be duplicated with SDL, for example.

rogercruz wrote:
> 3) Are all the X11 dependencies in Wine contained in the winex11.drv driver or are there other areas of the code where it uses X or assumes it is running on an X system?

For the most part yes. But there are number of parts in user32 (input, graphics), OpenGL, wined3d (both opengl, graphics), dinput (input, controls). There are few other places that I can't recall now.

>> Good to know.  I was hoping it was all self contained to the winex11.drv.  I will look for other then.

rogercruz wrote:
> 4) Can SDL provide all the functionality Wine requires of its X driver or are there areas that can't be reproduced with SDL?

This is an open ended question. How much of Wine and how well do you want to work?

Not expert in SDL can't tell you for sure. But just rewriting window handling parts of winex11drv is a nightmare. Good luck with that.

>> I need to have Wine run as well as it does in Linux, that's the short answer but I will settle for
>> running Office 2007 and then add whatever else is needed to support other apps.

>> Any other thoughts/guides/links on how to port Wine to another platform (pared down linux version) 
>> would be greatly appreciated it.







rogercruz wrote:
> 1) Would it be possible to run Wine on a non-X11 system if I replace its X11 backend driver with an SDL backend?

As-is - no, it's not possible. SDL is not X11 compatible (it's not a drop-in replacement for X11).
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