[Wine] Re: Question about Wine

[SpawnHappyJake]

As far as I know, the main limitation of Wine is that it is not a kernel. This means that Wine can't (unless the dev team gets really creative in this regard, such as developing a Wine Linux kernel module or something) let anything see the hardware directly. It simply doesn't have the access. Though it can query the kernel for hardware info and translate this info to be available by WinAPI request. So it typically can't let drivers talk to the hardware. Also, kernel-mode drivers obviously are a double issue (1. It's a driver 2. It's kernel-mode) and thus Wine can't run any Windows hardware emulation program (which work via Windows kernel-mode driver). Technically there are cases where Wine can use a driver, and the USB patch is exciting, which allows certain USB drivers to run in Wine, but anything that wants to talk directly with hardware isn't likely to happen. Hardware spec getting programs such as Sandra Lite, CPU-ID, GPU-ID, Speccy, etc. don't work in Wine, though they can someday via querying the kernel for this info and making it available upon WinAPI request.

Jake

Note that "drivers" that don't actually directly talk to hardware, such as Zeckensack's,