Prototype implementation of a shared memory winserver

[Peter Hunnisett]

Hi,
  in the quest for speed parity in multimedia applications TransGaming 
has investigated a few options in dealing with the nasty overhead of the 
present wineserver implementation. I have just recently posted a 
prototype patch for a shared memory wineserver, to the ReWind project, 
(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1413925&forum_id=8836) 
which, in a small benchmarking suite, has shown some remarkable 
performance gains. The concept for the shm wineserver came about during 
discussions at the OLS in 2002 and remained a concept until a little 
while ago we had enough time to create a working prototype.

  TransGaming is donating this code to the ReWind project in the hopes 
that it will encourage other Wine developers to continue to share code 
under the more open BSD/X11 style license and to help overcome the 
remaining issues with this approach.

  Rather than make a really long technical email, we decided that a bit 
of a paper would be more appropriate (it also has links to the patches). 
The paper can be found at http://www.transgaming.com/papers/shmserver.html


Regards,
Peter Hunnisett
peter at transgaming.com