Yes QEMU can do syscall conversion iirc, at least in some modes. I don't think you could get much higher performance than eg, Virtual PC to be honest. Maybe if you developed some way of pre-converting the binaries beforehand rather than doing it on the fly, but VPC type systems have the advantage of having very limited interaction points between the host OS and the client OS which can be tightly optimized (eg, video ram), so they can perform a lot of tricks you can't do if you want to integrate better with the OS. Please do some basic research, otherwise you just come off sounding ignorant: a) Wine is not under the GPL and never was, it's under the LGPL b) TransGamings Cedega forked from Wine several years ago, back when it was under the X11 license which allowed that. So they don't have to contribute their code back. c) That fork was what motivated the switch to LGPL. d) Quite a few of TransGamings porting projects don't seem to involve Wine at any level. For instance Gav told me about a game they ported which used Java. Intererestingly, I think Gav thought the Java port was *harder* than Wine ports were due to the huge instability of Java on the Mac platform. He said at one point Apple pushed out an online update to Java which broke their game and then withdrew it, leaving no way for them to duplicate the environment that their customers were having problems with (amongst other problems)! So much for "write once, run anywhere" ... You realise that a quartzdrv would not change the fact that Windows apps look like Windows apps, right? All it changes is the way the bits drawn by Wine get to the screen. To be honest I think you'd achieve much better results by improving the quartzwm so X11 windows integrate better with the dock etc. If quartzwm is proprietary (don't recall) then writing a new WM that is equivalent and has all the features you need would be another way forward. While it's interesting from a technical perspective to do a quartzdrv, I'm really not convinced you would get better integration than just improving the X11 support in the OS, which would obviously also benefit those who use Linux/X11 apps on the Mac as well as Wine users. Anyway .. what I meant by that statement is that if you're running x86 Wine in QEMU you can't access the Carbon APIs directly. I think in the mode where you run foreign binaries QEMU will perform syscall conversion but obviously this is of limited use - the OS X APIs aren't accessible via syscalls. One thing you could do I guess is expose each OS X API that you wanted as a new "fake" syscall and then use a customized version of QEMU that converted it into a Mac API call, ie marshal the calls in and out of the emulated environment. You'd still pay a performance penalty but that's unavoidable. I'm not sure how you'd deal with callbacks.

"Pierre d'Herbemont" <stegefin(a)free.fr> writes: So why do you want to swap the headers, if you can't do anything with the exe anyway? -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.org

N.B. The only substantive paragraph here is the last one, so folks interested in the X86/PPC linking problem should just jump down there. Mike Hearn wrote: Obviously I completely disagree. Such tweaking at the device layer is stuck with emulating all the code all the time plus driver stacking and will never achieve native performance. Darwine's plan for integrated emulation means that it has the potential for native performance with the only penalty being for application code which must be emulated. And because we change the loader it can be precompiled delivering performance which could be several times faster than what a VPC/QEMU OS (or user mode) virtualization can do. Of course I'm ignorant of the most everything regarding Wine history. How is that germane to anything? Your hostile attitude is why I try to limit Darwine discussion on wine-devel only to wine-specific issues. Oh please. Well that makes sense. I couldn't make heads or tails of their licensing. Although it does say something about the Wine of WineX 2 being LGPL. In any case it seemed clear that whatever they had is not free. Also I can't see why they would want to do any X86 emulation at all since games do usually need maximum performance. I have to figure that they are using Winelib. Of course as you say I am ignorant of the facts, although I would be delighted if any Transgaming or related folks would help with Darwine. That was indeed true before OS X. Typically ironic/tragic of Apple that the machines most in need of WORA had lousy Java. Fortunately on OS X the Java is at least as good and in some cases (such as Swing performance) is better than on Windows. This is another area that integration opens up for innovation. I agree that a really good WM for OS X X11 could make X11 applications almost behave like decent Mac applications. I'm sure that there are folks who like X11 and OS X working on it. Apple's support for X11 is a delightful surprise. Of course even so, as I said to begin with, such driver layering is devastating to performance and any hope of order-of-magnitude speed up. Yes, quite so. The ideal method would be to handle this with a trick loader that can link to PPC code which is escaped from the X86 emulation. We can automatically generate X86 DLLs for the PPC dynamic libraries (and hence the OS X APIs) which have little emulation escape thunks in them. There is zero performance penalty since the emulator can compile such escapes as direct native calls. Callbacks use a similar sort of little thunk which calls the emulator with a given X86 address. I would really like to get away from having to write all the little wrappers to deal with the namespace problem. I believe we can solve that with a suitable naming convention as we began to do with the winegcc patch. Alternatively we could go with with dynamic binding as proposed by Alexandre and have a syscall (or emulation escape) to call PPC code. This is probably the easiest to implement but leaves us with extra call overhead (although apparently this is something that is currently done in Wine and is quite small). By using suitable macros we can make the source independent of which method is used. The thing we don't get away from is that any code which calls OS X routines from X86 code *will* have to deal with endianess. There is overhead here, but we can be careful to use code that the emulator does a good job translating. Of course if there is substantial code (which would be unusual) it can simply be compiled as a PPC dynamic library. As for swapping functions, the preceding discussion reiterates my belief that we should confine such fussy business to the relatively small bit of code that calls into OS X, will be relatively stable over the long haul, and over which we have full control. And as for the concern over having Wine be X86 and hence incurring emulation overhead, this would be one of the first bits of code which would be a candidate for having its emulator-compiled code cached. Jim White

Le 25 août 04, à 23:01, Jim White a écrit : I think we can forget this solution, loading symbol at launch time works like a charm :) (BTW it was indeed winebuild which was patched) Pierre.

Le 26 août 04, à 00:58, Jim White a écrit : I still believe it is the *best* way for us to go. But I agree that as a first step we can go for qemu-darwin-i386-user, that's why I am now working a bit on qemu-darwin-i386-user. Pierre

Mike Hearn wrote: This is the more general project that has emerged from my initial idea for Darwine, namely X86/Linux binary compatibility for OS X. There are quite a few folks working on various combinations of Linux/BSD/Darwin/Mach compatibility, but only for the native processor. While there has been a ton of end user interest in Darwine in order to run Windows apps, I have found that integrating CPU emulation into the kernel compatibility layer attracts broad developer interest. As we work through the implementation of Darwine I believe we will have solutions for all these problems and OS X will indeed become quite the Swiss Army knife of platforms. Jim White

Mike Hearn wrote: Your knowledge of porting is evidently limited. The folks at the Fink project would be surprised to learn that what they're doing is simple. For starters there is Wine. Although X86/Darwin should work fine (as I'm guessing the loader is not needed), obviously working with your preferred platform will help with compatibility questions. Beyond that there are plenty of other applications that are dependent on ELF in various ways making porting anything but simple. When you realize that there can be more than a little gap between what users' want and can do for themselves and what developers' are interested in and actually do (and when they do it), it is very easy to understand why being able to run a supported-and-tested binary RPM can be hugely preferrable to creating yet-another-port of an application. So even though Mac OS X's popularity ensures that most useful applications will be ported and supported, the number of applications that fall into the gap is plenty big enough. Jim White

Jim White wrote: The only way you will be able to use the Wine libraries compiled natively while running x86 executables will be to extend the current spec format so that it works similar to IDL files. You will also need to do generate wrapper code for each COM interface too. Also, there are limitations in what you can specify (and quirks such as off-by-one errors in Windows). Perhaps you would be able to special case these and be left with a manageable task, or perhaps not. There is also the fact that the wrapper code for leaf functions may take longer to execute than the code itself. To get good performance out you will probably need to compile these types of functions (such as string manipulation functions in kernel32, shlwapi, user32) as x86. Good luck with solving these issues (although I think the estimate of getting most programs that run on Wine working in 1 year that you stated in your interview is very ambitious). Rob

From the limited experience I have the problem is that if a portion of code expect to have a certain type of endianness, it would make some special assumption, we won't be able to track out (See [1]). And it will be even harder to track the issues for the x86 already compiled code, in Wine we can for instance track the specific function that cause troubles and replace it with safer functions (see strcmp, strlen...). Finally I think we should only relay on call conversion, and that my swapping on-the-fly technics is not sure enough to be applied here. Pierre. [1] http://stegefin.free.fr/wine/ On 25 août 04, at 14:37, Pablo Bendersky wrote: