PE loader integrated into BSD

[Steve Langasek]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2002 at 12:15:51PM -0800, Dan Kegel wrote:
> Steve Langasek wrote:

> > On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 10:55:41PM -0800, Dan Kegel wrote:
> > > At Wineconf tonight, people were talking about
> > > whether integrating bits of wine into the kernel
> > > was useful, and how much should be moved in.
> > > (Hello task ornaments!)  Anyway, I mentioned that
> > > somebody had integrated a PE loader into BSD.  Here's the page:
> > > http://chiharu.hauN.ORG/peace/
> > > I think this is pretty darn cool, and hope somebody
> > > does something similar for Linux.
> > 
> > On Linux, support for 'foreign' binary types has been generalized using
> > the binfmt_misc interface which is controllable at runtime through /proc.
> > Debian goes so far as to provide a package called 'binfmt-support' which
> > automates setup of additional userland executable loaders.  It actually
> > works quite well with Wine, in fact.

> I can't shake the feeling that it'd be useful to have
> basic PE support in the OS, and make Wine be essentially
> a set of shared libraries.

The Linux kernel maintainers are likely to disagree with you, since when 
binfmt_misc support was added, even Java was kicked out of the kernel. ;)  
In any case, I think the current situation is really pretty close to what 
you want.  Just as ELF library resolution is actually done by a userland
process (ld.so), so is PE resolution (through wineserver).  With 
binfmt_misc, PE executables are supported as well as Java or any scripting 
language, without the dangers associated with adding large and potentially 
buggy loading routines directly to the kernel.

My understanding is that effectively, Wine already /has/ evolved to the 
point that it's little more than a set of shared libraries plus a PE 
loader.  The fact that the PE loader runs in userland instead of as part 
of the kernel is a definite advantage, IMHO.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer