Status of 64 bit Wine

[Francois Gouget]

On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, Michael Ost wrote:
[...]
> Thanks for the link. It says AMD64 --- I hope this doesn't sound stupid 
> but will that work on 64 bit Intels too?

Yes. It's called AMD64 in many places because the 64bit extension of the 
x86 ISA was made by AMD and Intel played catch up later. So for instance 
on my Core 2 Quad I use the amd64 Linux kernel (2.6.26-1-amd64).



[...]
> "Pacman" is a windows 64 binary, with the windows ABI? And that required 
> your local gcc patch to work, right? Does --enable-win64 alter gcc so it 
> builds code that can deal with the windows 64 bit conventions?

That's also the way I understand it.


> Knowing that you got past that would be good news, because this sounded 
> like the biggest, scariest part when I looked into it a while back.

Yep. However once we're past this stage there is still a lot of work. 
Not scary because it's hard but because of the size of it, fixing types 
all over the place:
 * long -> LONG when related to the Windows API
 * DWORD -> DWORD_PTR when used to pass around pointers
 * spec file fixes: long -> ptr

Then there will be the harder issue of getting 64bit and 32bit binaries 
to play nice together: a 64bit executable should be able to start a 
32bit one and vice versa, and both should talk to the same Wine server.

But yes. With the gcc issue fixed the future looks much brighter.


-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
 "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on
       ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" -- Linus Torvalds