Wine's Registry Format

[David Lee Lambert]

On Thursday 16 June 2005 11:20 pm, you wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 22:22:56 +0200, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> > Actually the current method is probably the fastest for everything
> > except the initial read.
>
> The only reason that the current method is fast is because we're loading
> the entire registry into memory.  As stated in Bugzilla, this is fine for
> small registries, but the author of the bug has noted wineserver allocated
> up to 30MB when wine initiates JUST for the registry!

How do you propose to keep track of multiple sources of the registry data?  At 
one time Wine supported system-wide registry files as well as per-user ones,  
and some people would like to see that again.

> Using BerkeleyDB to access the registry would provide the kind of
> random-access that we need for such a large amount of information

Samba already uses something called 'TDB', and it's been suggested that the 
two projects could share a case-insensitive-filename layer based on it;  
could you look into using that?

> - It 
> would also provide us with a quicker and easier way to search through the
> registry - so we could finally implement the Find feature in wine's
> regedit without much effort ( Not that it couldn't be done as is, but
> things would definitely be easier ).

This could only be done at the expense of several times increase in on-disk 
storage, and would actually not be used very much.  

A more useful enhancement would be to support PCRE syntax for 
find-and-replace,  or multiple views of data, or version-control of the 
registry... in fact,  there are Windows programs that do all that,  and all 
they require is a good, stable, quick implementation of the registry calls,  
which is what Wine provides.

-- 
DLL

GPG key at http://www.cse.msu.edu/~lamber45/newmail.htm?GPGkey
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