Need ideas about ntoskrnl

[Mike McCormack]

Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
> We need ntoskrnl to run some subset of drivers on wine. Notably cd protection
> drivers. They are not a hardware drivers, but a means to access something that
> is not accessible from user space. So in a sense ntoskrnl is just a process to
> run those drivers in, and send/receive requests to/from those drivers.
> 
> You need to keep in mind that this is a kernel level, so some things will not
> work, and some things have to work that normally do not in the user space. Also
> ntoskrnl for windows _is_ what wineserver for wine.

I think that the only way to make device drivers work properly is to 
eliminate wineserver completely, and make it what it really wants to be, 
which is a user mode implementation of ntoskrnl, something like User 
Mode Linux.

That would require being able to write to a process's memory from the 
ntoskrnl, which is what your really need to implement ReadFile and 
WriteFile so device driver can work properly.

That project is really beyond the scope of Wine... but an interesting 
one none the less :)

Mike