When will Wine integrate an x86 CPU emulator?

[Francois Gouget]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Jim White wrote:

> Kelly Leahy wrote:
> > Not sure I agree with paragraph two of the answer...
> > ...
>
> I don't care for the answer much myself.  Certainly "never" is not
> reasonable as Wine for non-x86 systems is desireable and eventually
> enough effort will be expended to get the job done.

I think it's reasonable as there are much better solutions from a
complexity and maintainability point of vue. Thus it's better to say
never and direct efforts towards these other solutions rather than wait
for an elusive solution the superiority of which is not even very clear.


[...]
> for many folks the answer to "When will Wine
> be finished?" is effectively "never" because it is more than a year
[...]

It's a sure bet that Wine won't have an integrated emulator in a year. I
would even go so far as to say it won't happen within the next 15 years.


> It would be nice to mention Darwine in connection with these
> Wine-for-other-systems FAQs as progress has been demonstrated with
> Winelib for Mac OS X and the stated goal is an eventual integrated x86
> emulator.

Yes, definitely. I propose the patch below.
By the way, does anyone out there know what's the status of:

 * Wine on NetBSD
   Currently we say that Wine does not work due to threading problems.
Is this still true?
   Also I have heard that it's possible to run Wine on NetBSD using
NetBSD's Linux emulation code. If so then it should be mentioned here.

 * Wine on OpenBSD / UnixWare
   Any change in status?

 * Wine on OS/2 is not mentionned though Wine on BeOS is. However Wine
on OS/2 is mentioned in the Wine developper's guide
(http://www.winehq.com/Docs/wine-devel/os2-wine.shtml). Yet both
projects seem rather dead. So should we mention the OS/2 project here,
remove both or what?



Index: documentation/faq.sgml
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/wine/wine/documentation/faq.sgml,v
retrieving revision 1.13
diff -u -r1.13 faq.sgml
--- documentation/faq.sgml	28 Jul 2003 19:06:10 -0000	1.13
+++ documentation/faq.sgml	21 Aug 2003 11:07:50 -0000
@@ -520,12 +631,17 @@
       </question>
       <answer>
         <para>
-          Wine is being developed specifically to run on the <emphasis>Intel x86</emphasis> class of CPUs under certain UNIXes that run on the x86 platform.
-	  Winelib however is capable of porting Windows program <emphasis>source code</emphasis> to other platforms also, not only x86.
+          Wine is being developed specifically to run on the <emphasis>Intel
+          x86</emphasis> class of CPUs under certain UNIXes that run on the
+          x86 platform. Winelib however is capable of porting Windows
+          program <emphasis>source code</emphasis> to other platforms also,
+          not only x86.
         </para>
         <para>
-          Thus running Windows programs via Wine on other platforms (e.g. MacOS X) is <emphasis>not</emphasis> possible; the only way to run Windows code
-	  on MacOS X would be to take Windows program source code and recompile it for e.g. MacOS X using Winelib.
+          Thus running Windows programs solely via Wine on other platforms
+          (e.g. Mac OS X) is <emphasis>not</emphasis> possible. You would
+          have to either run Wine in an emulated x86 environment or take
+          the Windows program source code and recompile it using Winelib.
 	</para>
 	<para>
 	  The following will list the x86 operating systems supported by
@@ -533,7 +649,7 @@
 	  so it's not specifically listed here.
 	</para>
         <para>
-          NetBSD, OpenBSD, Unixware, and SCO OpenServer 5 worked at one time,
+          NetBSD, OpenBSD, UnixWare, and SCO OpenServer 5 worked at one time,
           but Wine now requires kernel-level threads which are not currently
           available (or understood by the Wine team) on those platforms.
         </para>
@@ -542,9 +658,18 @@
           commercial UNIX and UNIX clone vendors as well.
         </para>
         <para>
-          BeOS: porting efforts used to be pretty strong, but BeOS has severe
-          limitations in Unix call support, so a port will probably never
-          happen.
+          BeOS: porting efforts (BeWine) used to be pretty strong, but BeOS
+          has severe limitations in Unix call support. The demise of BeOS
+          further hampered the project though it might come back one day on
+          one of the open BeOS projects. In any case a functional port seems
+          unlikely to ever happen at this stage.
+        </para>
+        <para>
+          Mac OS X / Darwin: The <ulink
+          url="http://darwine.sourceforge.net/project.html">Darwine</> is
+          currently working on porting Wine to the Darwin/x86 platform. Their
+          goal is to eventually make it possible to run x86 Windows
+          applications on Darwin/PPC and then Mac OS X by using Bochs.
         </para>
         <para>
           FreeBSD: Should work, with limitations in specific areas (mainly


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                  Hiroshima '45 - Czernobyl '86 - Windows '95