Running drivers in userspace/VM

[Marcus Meissner]

Hi,

Wine itself implements a minimal NT driver layer, with the main goal currently
to run copy protection drivers and later on HID and USB drivers that
operate on top of the NT HID and USB core drivers.

So Wine implements some bits of ntoskrnl.exe, doing (c).

So far I have not heard of anyone planning to do the other parts, and I can 
not realistically evaluate the scope.

Ciao, Marcus
On Fri, Oct 07, 2016 at 06:10:15PM +0300, KOLANICH wrote:
> Hello everybody. ReactOS project is devoted to making an OS kernel binary compatible with NT kernel. In their official FAQ it is written that they cannot be replaced with GNU/Linux + Wine because of drivers which cannot be run in Wine. I'm a bit sceptical about their OS, so I wonder why cannot drivers be run in wine?
> 
> Drivers are run in ring 0 or 1, right? Why it is impossible/too complicated to 
> a) expose some privileged instructions into userland through API;
> b) expose IO space using IOPL;
> c) make a mock of NT kernel to allow the drivers use its ABI;
> d) patch the binaries automatically to use API instead of privileged instructions;
> e) if a driver doesn't works well enough in userland, create a micro-VM using VT-x and VT-d and put there NT kernel mock and the driver?
> 
>