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Wine release 20011108
by Alexandre Julliard Nov. 8, 2001

Nov. 8, 2001

This is release 20011108 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly. Patches should be submitted to "wine-patches(a)winehq.com". Please don't forget to include a ChangeLog entry. WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20011108: (see ChangeLog for details) - Shared windows support starts doing something useful. - Overlapped I/O improvements. - Support for running files from removable media. - Many shlwapi improvements. - Quartz dll keeps growing. - Lots of bug fixes. See the README file in the distribution for installation instructions. Because of lags created by using mirror, this message may reach you before the release is available at the ftp sites. The sources will be available from the following locations: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-20011108.tar.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/linux/sunsite/ALPHA/wine/development/Wi… ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/linux/mirrors/sunsite.unc.edu/ALPHA/wine/develo… ftp://orcus.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/Wine/development/Wine-20011108.tar.gz It should also be available from any other site that mirrors ibiblio.org. For more download locations, see http://ftpsearch.lycos.com. These locations also hold pre-built documentation packages in various formats: wine-doc-html.tar.gz, wine-doc-txt.tar.gz, wine-doc.pdf.gz and wine-doc.ps.gz. You can also get the current source directly from the CVS tree. Check http://www.winehq.com/dev.shtml for details. If you submitted a patch, please check to make sure it has been included in the new release. If you want to receive by mail a patch against the previous release when a new one is released, you can subscribe to the mailing list at http://tiger.informatik.hu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wine-patches. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Wine release 20011004
by Alexandre Julliard Oct. 4, 2001

Oct. 4, 2001

This is release 20011004 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly. Patches should be submitted to "wine-patches(a)winehq.com". Please don't forget to include a ChangeLog entry. WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20011004: (see ChangeLog for details) - Beginnings of shared window handles. - Much improved typelib support. - Tons of new code in quartz dll. - Lots of bug fixes. See the README file in the distribution for installation instructions. Because of lags created by using mirror, this message may reach you before the release is available at the ftp sites. The sources will be available from the following locations: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-20011004.tar.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/linux/sunsite/ALPHA/wine/development/Wi… ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/linux/mirrors/sunsite.unc.edu/ALPHA/wine/develo… ftp://orcus.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/Wine/development/Wine-20011004.tar.gz It should also be available from any other site that mirrors ibiblio.org. For more download locations, see http://ftpsearch.lycos.com. These locations also hold pre-built documentation packages in various formats: wine-doc-html.tar.gz, wine-doc-txt.tar.gz, wine-doc.pdf.gz and wine-doc.ps.gz. You can also get the current source directly from the CVS tree. Check http://www.winehq.com/dev.shtml for details. If you submitted a patch, please check to make sure it has been included in the new release. If you want to receive by mail a patch against the previous release when a new one is released, you can subscribe to the mailing list at http://tiger.informatik.hu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wine-patches. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Wine release 20010824
by Alexandre Julliard Aug. 24, 2001

Aug. 24, 2001

This is release 20010824 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly. Patches should be submitted to "wine-patches(a)winehq.com". Please don't forget to include a ChangeLog entry. WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20010824: (see ChangeLog for details) - Inter-process SendMessage support. - More DDE improvements. - Preparation work for shared window handles. - Several debugger improvements. - Better GDI objects management. - Lots of bug fixes. See the README file in the distribution for installation instructions. Because of lags created by using mirror, this message may reach you before the release is available at the ftp sites. The sources will be available from the following locations: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-20010824.tar.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/linux/sunsite/ALPHA/wine/development/Wi… ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/linux/mirrors/sunsite.unc.edu/ALPHA/wine/develo… ftp://orcus.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/Wine/development/Wine-20010824.tar.gz It should also be available from any other site that mirrors ibiblio.org. For more download locations, see http://ftpsearch.lycos.com. These locations also hold pre-built documentation packages in various formats: wine-doc-html.tar.gz, wine-doc-txt.tar.gz, wine-doc.pdf.gz and wine-doc.ps.gz. You can also get the current source directly from the CVS tree. Check http://www.winehq.com/dev.html for details. If you submitted a patch, please check to make sure it has been included in the new release. If you want to receive by mail a patch against the previous release when a new one is released, you can subscribe to the mailing list at http://tiger.informatik.hu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wine-patches. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Wine release 20010629
by Alexandre Julliard June 29, 2001

June 29, 2001

This is release 20010629 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly. Patches should be submitted to "wine-patches(a)winehq.com". Please don't forget to include a ChangeLog entry. WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20010629: (see ChangeLog for details) - Better font metrics support in Postscript driver using Freetype. - Major window management redesign (still in progress). - Message queues in wineserver to prepare for inter-process messaging. - DDE merged from Corel tree, plus various fixes. - 64-bit file size support. - Lots of bug fixes. See the README file in the distribution for installation instructions. Because of lags created by using mirror, this message may reach you before the release is available at the ftp sites. The sources will be available from the following locations: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-20010629.tar.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/linux/sunsite/ALPHA/wine/development/Wi… ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/linux/mirrors/sunsite.unc.edu/ALPHA/wine/develo… ftp://orcus.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/Wine/development/Wine-20010629.tar.gz It should also be available from any other site that mirrors ibiblio.org. For more download locations, see http://ftpsearch.lycos.com. These locations also hold pre-built documentation packages in various formats: wine-doc-html.tar.gz, wine-doc-txt.tar.gz, wine-doc.pdf.gz and wine-doc.ps.gz. You can also get the current source directly from the CVS tree. Check http://www.winehq.com/dev.html for details. If you submitted a patch, please check to make sure it has been included in the new release. If you want to receive by mail a patch against the previous release when a new one is released, you can subscribe to the mailing list at http://tiger.informatik.hu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wine-patches. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Wine release 20010510
by Alexandre Julliard May 10, 2001

May 10, 2001

This is release 20010510 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly. Patches should be submitted to "wine-patches(a)winehq.com". Please don't forget to include a ChangeLog entry. WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20010510: (see ChangeLog for details) - Many improvements to printing support. - Some graphics driver restructurations. - Lots of bug fixes. See the README file in the distribution for installation instructions. Because of lags created by using mirror, this message may reach you before the release is available at the ftp sites. The sources will be available from the following locations: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-20010510.tar.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/linux/sunsite/ALPHA/wine/development/Wi… ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/linux/mirrors/sunsite.unc.edu/ALPHA/wine/develo… ftp://orcus.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/Wine/development/Wine-20010510.tar.gz It should also be available from any other site that mirrors ibiblio.org. For more download locations, see http://ftpsearch.lycos.com. These locations also hold pre-built documentation packages in various formats: wine-doc-html.tar.gz, wine-doc-txt.tar.gz, wine-doc.pdf.gz and wine-doc.ps.gz. You can also get the current source directly from the CVS tree. Check http://www.winehq.com/dev.html for details. If you submitted a patch, please check to make sure it has been included in the new release. If you want to receive by mail a patch against the previous release when a new one is released, you can subscribe to the mailing list at http://tiger.informatik.hu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wine-patches. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Wine release 20010418
by Alexandre Julliard April 18, 2001

April 18, 2001

This is release 20010418 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly. Patches should be submitted to "wine-patches(a)winehq.com". Please don't forget to include a ChangeLog entry. WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20010418: (see ChangeLog for details) - DirectDraw restructuration and improvements. - MSVCRT headers for compiling Winelib apps. - Postscript driver enhancements. - Several multimedia fixes. - Lots of bug fixes. See the README file in the distribution for installation instructions. Because of lags created by using mirror, this message may reach you before the release is available at the ftp sites. The sources will be available from the following locations: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-20010418.tar.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/linux/sunsite/ALPHA/wine/development/Wi… ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/linux/mirrors/sunsite.unc.edu/ALPHA/wine/develo… ftp://orcus.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/Wine/development/Wine-20010418.tar.gz It should also be available from any other site that mirrors ibiblio.org. For more download locations, see http://ftpsearch.lycos.com. These locations also hold pre-built documentation packages in various formats: wine-doc-html.tar.gz, wine-doc-txt.tar.gz, wine-doc.pdf.gz and wine-doc.ps.gz. You can also get the current source directly from the CVS tree. Check http://www.winehq.com/dev.html for details. If you submitted a patch, please check to make sure it has been included in the new release. If you want to receive by mail a patch against the previous release when a new one is released, you can subscribe to the mailing list at http://tiger.informatik.hu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wine-patches. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Wine Weekly News is suspended
by eric pouech April 10, 2001

April 10, 2001

-- --------------- Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/) "The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle Wine Weekly News All the News that Fits, we print. Events, progress, and happenings in the Wine community for April 09, 2001 . _________________________________________________________________ Headlines _________________________________________________________________ For personal reasons (mainly current work load), I won't able to continue writing the Wine Weekly News. All the Wine community is currently looking for someone to take the job over. If you're interested, let me know, I'll help for the switch (as the edition process is done, it would be possible to have several editors, so don't hesitate to drop me a note if you're interested). I sincerly apologize to all the readers for the inconvenience and the delay for bringing you the latest news from the exciting Wine world. _________________________________________________________________ Credits: [1]Doug Ridgway, [2]Eric Pouech, and [3]Ove Kåven. _________________________________________________________________ References 1. mailto:ridgway(a)winehq.com 2. mailto:pouech(a)winehq.com 3. mailto:ovek(a)winehq.com

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Wine release 20010326
by Alexandre Julliard March 26, 2001

March 26, 2001

This is release 20010326 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly. Patches should be submitted to "wine-patches(a)winehq.com". Please don't forget to include a ChangeLog entry. WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20010326: (see ChangeLog for details) - Serial async I/O improvements. - Support for app-specific dll overrides in config file. - Lots of bug fixes. See the README file in the distribution for installation instructions. Because of lags created by using mirror, this message may reach you before the release is available at the ftp sites. The sources will be available from the following locations: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/Wine-20010326.tar.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/linux/sunsite/ALPHA/wine/development/Wi… ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/linux/mirrors/sunsite.unc.edu/ALPHA/wine/develo… ftp://orcus.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/Wine/development/Wine-20010326.tar.gz It should also be available from any other site that mirrors ibiblio.org. For more download locations, see http://ftpsearch.lycos.com. These locations also hold pre-built documentation packages in various formats: wine-doc-html.tar.gz, wine-doc-txt.tar.gz, wine-doc.pdf.gz and wine-doc.ps.gz. You can also get the current source directly from the CVS tree. Check http://www.winehq.com/dev.html for details. If you submitted a patch, please check to make sure it has been included in the new release. If you want to receive by mail a patch against the previous release when a new one is released, you can subscribe to the mailing list at http://tiger.informatik.hu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wine-patches. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Wine Weekly News #86 (2001 Week 11)
by Eric Pouech March 14, 2001

March 14, 2001

enjoy this week edition. A+ -- --------------- Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/) "The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle Wine Weekly News All the News that Fits, we print. Events, progress, and happenings in the Wine community for March 12, 2001 . _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Headlines _________________________________________________________________ Daniel Schwarz' web site ([1] http://www.winecentric.com/) has been completely revamped and now has expanded coverage: in addition to the existing coverage of Lotus Notes, info for Microsoft Excel '97 have been added (How to install, how to use, tips and tricks, etc). _________________________________________________________________ Keeping track of Wine _________________________________________________________________ * Andreas Mohr contributed a winecheck script that lets users check that Wine is configured somewhat correctly. * Alexandre Julliard made the wineserver protocol reentrant. * Ian Pilcher moved the PostScript AFM loader's previously hardcoded font paths into .wine/config instead. * Other Workers/Bugfixers: Marcus Meissner (KDE2 support), Gerard Patel (misc dialogs and menus), Mike McCormack (overlapped I/O), Rein Klazes (message conversion), James Juran (win98/2000 stubs), Nerijus Baliunas (Latvian), Hann-huei Chiou (Chinese) + CodeWeavers: François Gouget (winemaker), Dmitry Timoshkov (edit/combobox control), Huw D M Davies _________________________________________________________________ Discussions on wine-devel _________________________________________________________________ This week, 30 posts consumed 128 K. There were 16 different contributors, 4 (25%) posted more than once, and 6 (37%) posted last week too. The top posters of the week were: * 9 posts in 31 K by "Alexandre Julliard" <julliard(a)winehq.com> * 5 posts in 28 K by David Howells <dhowells(a)cambridge.redhat.com> * 2 posts in 7 K by Gavriel State <gav(a)transgaming.com> * 2 posts in 24 K by Michael McCormack <mccormac(a)aals27.alcatel.com.au> Enhanced asynchronous I/O Evolution Michael McCormack provided a first version of a patch to enhance the I/O operations in Wine: This patch moves responsibility for asynchronous I/O to the client process. I think this implementation is more efficient, as it makes fewer server calls and duplicates fewer file descriptors, while maintaining correctness. However, Mike requested some feedback on his patch. Alexandre Julliard objected several points: * first of all, the patch conflicted with underway work from Alexandre: "your approach is not going to work with the latest changes I made to the server. The good news is that the changes I'm making are in part to allow making server calls in signal handlers, so when this works you should be able to use SIGIO to do async IO." * secondly, Alexandre really doubted the patch improved the performance. Mike tried to defend a bit his changes (especially, in the area of performance, where Mike thought he drastically reduced the number of context switches and the number of server calls), but Alexandre remained dubious: "Reducing the number of server calls but making them more expensive is not necessarily a gain. Show me the numbers..." Later on, Mike provided a second patch (a derivation of the first one, making use of Alexandre's latest improvements on the server communication protocol). Here are the final results of a simple test program Mike wrote (against Wine 2001/03/05): Wine's patch average write time for "AT" command average read time for response vanilla 675 µsec 634 µsec Mike's patch 362 µsec 322 µsec Sounds like a big gain!!! However, this doesn't fix one of Alexandre favorite topics: getting rid of the service thread (it's only use as of today is the handling of asynchronous requests). Using (SIGIO) signals should help getting rid of it. So, this discussion is likely not finished yet. We'll keep you posted with its follow-up. Wine's speed up (cont'd) Evolution Following [2]last weeks' discussions , David Howells, Alexandre Julliard and Gavriel State resumed their exchanges. David re-iterated his "main gripe against the slow speed of access to files... Every Read/WriteFile goes to the wineserver to convert the handle into a file descriptor and to check for locking. The FD is then passed back over a UNIX domain socket, used once and then closed." Alexandre Julliard explained this had just been enhanced: the file descriptor is only transferred once. All subsequent accesses only check if the file descriptor on client's side is still valid, hence reducing the complexity and the length of the server call (but, not the number of calls). The latency of the Wine server call is rather high as David explained: Context switching is the main element of it. Going to the wineserver and back again just for a ReadFile() call or a Wait*() function incurs a fairly serious penalty (particularly on an X86, I think). Plus there's no requirement for the kernel to pass the remains of your timeslice to the wineserver and back again. Since the context switch also implies that "you have to flush all the CPU caches, muck around with the MMU and execute scheduling algorithms", this can explain some of the latency. However, Alexandre thinks "that it should be possible to improve that by a small kernel hack. It will never be as fast as doing everything in the kernel of course, but it may just be fast enough to avoid the need to reimplement the whole server." and that "we are doing more than two switches (though I haven't proved it), which is why I think there is a margin for improvement. You'll obviously always have the context switch cost unless everything is in the kernel." By a small kernel hack, Alexandre means " having a specialized fifo, a network protocol, an ioctl, etc. Basically any mechanism that ensures that we do the strict minimum number of context switches and schedule() calls for a server call. And probably also a way to transfer chunks of memory from the client address space so that we don't need the shared memory area. ". David already suggested a new protocol (AF_WINE) which could nicely fit into this category (and also let the ability to use the internal API on non Linux platforms, although the kernel module had to be rewritten). David also asked Alexandre how does he "plan on doing the locking stuff for Read/WriteFile? Cache it locally? It is unfortunate, but you can't really make use of UNIX file locking, since this is mostly advisory and as such doesn't actively stop read/write calls.". Alexandre quickly replied "Yes, we'll need to store the locks in the server and check them before each read/write (and probably also release them afterwards if necessary). There may be some optimizations possible, but we should probably do it the easy way first.". This would, of course, require some more server calls. Later on, Gavriel explained that Alexandre would unlikely accept a huge patch at once, and that he'd rather have an incremental approach. Alexandre answered, but also spoke out some directions for adding such a kernel module David is working on into Wine: The kernel module itself may be hard to do incrementally, but you should really consider reusing the existing server API so that your module can be plugged in easily. For instance your module entry points should be the same as the server requests, and use the same request structures. As a reminder, David used the int 0x2E trap (as any NT system does) to hook the kernel module up to the Wine code, putting more into the Linux kernel than Wine currently does with its wineserver. However, this introduces another API into Wine, and makes it quite difficult to maintain the two APIs (the INT 0x2E and the wineserver's). Alexandre explained what he had in mind a bit more clearly: "I'm not suggesting keeping the current socket stuff, just reusing the structures. So basically instead of passing the address of the stack arguments (which is really ugly IMO) to your ioctl, you pass one of the server request structures. This allows your changes to be localized to wine_server_call and doesn't require changing any of the routines that make server calls. Obviously you'd need some more changes for a few calls like ReadFile/WriteFile, but most operations could switch to your mechanism without needing any change. You simply cannot require people to recompile all of Wine to use your module." David also pointed out some strange issues with Wine loader. After some discussion, it turned out that alignments required by mmap did change between Linux 2.2 and 2.4. Wine did made the assumption that "Page alignment is needed for the address in memory, not for the offset inside the file on disk; since section virtual addresses in PE files are always page-aligned the memory address is never a problem. The only problem comes from the alignment of the data inside the PE file, and this is where we only need block-size alignment to make mmap possible." David also proposed some enhancements for the Linux 2.4 kernel. As a (temporary) conclusion, the area of optimizing the Wine architecture is still under heavy discussion. Many tracks are available, and the potential results/benefits are still not 100% clear. On the bright side, there's still lots of space for improvement. Credits: [3]Doug Ridgway, [4]Eric Pouech, and [5]Ove Kåven. _________________________________________________________________ References 1. http://www.winecentric.com/ 2. http://www.winehq.com/News/2001-10.html#0 3. mailto:ridgway(a)winehq.com 4. mailto:pouech(a)winehq.com 5. mailto:ovek(a)winehq.com

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Wine Weekly News #85 (2001 Week 10)
by Eric Pouech March 6, 2001

March 6, 2001

-- --------------- Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/) "The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle Wine Weekly News All the News that Fits, we print. Events, progress, and happenings in the Wine community for March 05, 2001 . _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Headlines _________________________________________________________________ Wine-20010305 has been released. Main changes include: * Some improvements to the wineserver protocol. * The usual common controls fixes/improvements. * Version information in builtin dlls. * Lots of bug fixes. _________________________________________________________________ Keeping track of Wine _________________________________________________________________ The following changes from the last two weeks made it into the 20010305 release. * Alexandre Julliard optimized wineserver communication some more (including better file descriptor caching), and strived for more DLL separation cleanliness. * Dmitry Timoshkov (CodeWeavers) added version resources to the core built-in dlls. * Eric Pouech implemented some shell32 rundll features (making the control panel starting to work). * David Grant added some copy and delete functions to the shell filedialog. * Workers/Bugfixers: Andreas Mohr (misc), Gerard Patel (16-bit print dialog, misc), Michael Stefaniuc (Winsock routing table query), Ian Pilcher (PostScript driver), Johannes Schindelin (German keyboard layout), Ove Kåven (winelauncher), Lionel Ulmer (OpenGL support), Vedan Rodic (DIB depth conversion), Przemyslaw Bruski (Mac codepage in locales), Valery Kartel (Ukrainan locale), Dominik Strasser, Chris Jacobson + CodeWeavers: François Gouget (winelib, winemaker, listview control), Dmitry Timoshkov (controls, windows, ANSI fileapis), Susan Farley (pager control), Aric Stewart (clipboard), Chris Morgan (mousewheel sysparam) _________________________________________________________________ Discussions on wine-devel _________________________________________________________________ This week, 45 posts consumed 190 K. There were 20 different contributors, 11 (55%) posted more than once, and 9 (45%) posted last week too. The top posters of the week were: * 7 posts in 17 K by Eric Pouech <Eric.Pouech(a)wanadoo.fr> * 6 posts in 38 K by "Alexandre Julliard" <julliard(a)winehq.com> * 5 posts in 17 K by Ian Pilcher <pilcher(a)concentric.net> * 3 posts in 9 K by lawson_whitney(a)juno.com * 3 posts in 23 K by Michael McCormack <mccormac(a)aals27.alcatel.com.au> * 2 posts in 9 K by David Elliott <dfe(a)infinite-internet.net> * 2 posts in 8 K by Andreas Mohr <a.mohr(a)mailto.de> * 2 posts in 6 K by Vedran Rodic <vedran(a)renata.irb.hr> * 2 posts in 5 K by Francois Gouget <fgouget(a)free.fr> * 2 posts in 4 K by "Ove Kaaven" <ovehk(a)ping.uio.no> * 2 posts in 0 K by Robert O'Callahan <roc+(a)cs.cmu.edu> Wine's speed-up Evolution (EdNote: resurrecting [1]old article) Gavriel State put out a speed issue in current Wine code: We've recently been working on getting American McGee's Alice (a visually stunning game, if you haven't seen it before) running well under Wine, and we've run into a serious speed issue with synchronization objects like Mutexes. Currently, Alice runs at about 50% the framerate it gets in Windows with the same graphics driver (NVidia). When we started investigating, it turned out that the reason for this is that it's spending half of it's time in the WineServer. At first we assumed that this was due to the fact that the GL thunks need to grab the X11 lock. We realized that this wasn't necessary for most GL calls if we're using a direct rendering GL implementation, and turned off the locks. There was no effect - because there really wasn't much contention for the x11 lock. After going through a number of similar Wine internal possibilities and getting nowhere, we finally realized that the problem was the app itself. It's grabbing and releasing a mutex of it's own bazillions of times each frame. Since there's nothing much we can do about that we started thinking about the proposed linux kernel module approach. After re-reading the thread (EdNote: you call also look at [2]WWN coverage part #1 and [3]WWN coverage part #2) and looking over the prototype, I have to concur with Alexandre's judgement - the prototype that exists is trying to do too much work. Gavriel and Ove Kaaven proposed to use a shared memory section between every process and the Wine server to help speeding up the lock/unlock operations. Alexandre Julliard didn't like the approach at all: I don't see how you are going to make this work reliably. A basic design principle of the server is that no matter what a client process does, it cannot break either the server or other clients; given the number of bugs Windows apps contain, I feel this is very important. As soon as you introduce a shared memory area, you need the collaboration of all clients to ensure the stability of the whole system, since any client can corrupt system data structures. This is very bad. Also since the server is single-threaded its data structures don't need to be protected; but as soon as you manipulate them from multiple threads you need locking mechanisms, which will probably cost a lot in performance too. Gavriel tried to minimize the impact on system stability of his proposal, but he couldn't convince Alexandre of it. Robert O'Callahan put on the table some other algorithms to tackle the issue. Unfortunately, they either required some "ugly" (read not accepted by Alexandre Julliard features) like letting the wine server call back some function on the client side, or using the already rejected shared memory approach. As a conclusion (since none went out of the discussion), it may be possible that Gav (with TransGaming) writes an almost right but quick implementation of the mutexes, but which wouldn't be commited into the main Wine tree because it wouldn't be completely right. Wine press coverage Report Eric Pouech posted a link to a [4]C|Net article, making a comparison of three Linux products, letting Windows applications run on Linux. Those products are Wine (of course), VMware and Win4Lin. The article is pretty much product (and end user) oriented, hence the final bad ranking for Wine (so far, the Wine had put more effort into adding feature, rather than putting a 1.0 version). However, the potential for Wine is here. It just needs some more (oouch) work to terminate the developments. Here are the overall comparison from the CNET Linux Center's review by Bill O'Brien:" Product Overall rank (1..10) The good The bad The bottom line VMware Workstation 2.03 9 Provides a self-contained Windows environment that makes its Linux host platform nearly immune to collateral damage. It's expensive. VMware is an essential IS tool for multiplatform application management. NeTraverse Win4Lin 2.0 7 Simple installation; good documentation; works as promised. No DirectX or Windows networking support. Win4Lin is a bargain Windows emulation platform if you need just the basics. Wine 5 Runs Windows apps without Windows; strong user community Difficult to use; spotty application support; still under heavy development. With its innovative approach to Windows compatibility, Wine is destined to play a major role in the world of Linux. But for now, it's not quite ready for prime time. " C Code style Evolution After an unwanted semi-colon had been found where it shouldn't: loops of the form: for (i = nFirst; i <= nLast; i++); { /* do something */ } , Andreas Mohr proposed several things. First of all, he wanted to add a space between the closing parenthesis and the semi-colon to indicate clearly the intent of putting an empty C expression. François Gouget replied he preferred the writing of such cases as <init_expression>; while (<test_condition>) { <update_expression>; } Alexandre Julliard more than agreed: he converted such cases into the while form of the loop. Andreas also looked for other places plagued with the same default and found another one (which he of course fixed). Unsurprinsignly, this almost started a flame war on coding style (how many spaces for a tab, which indentation style...). But it didn't happen. Wine developers seemed to like sticking to the rule of letting the developer do what best fits him (her), even if this doesn't provide a consistent coding style across the source files. Credits: [5]Doug Ridgway, [6]Eric Pouech, and [7]Ove Kåven. _________________________________________________________________ References 1. http://www.winehq.com/News/2001-08.html#4 2. http://www.winehq.com/News/2000-36.html#3 3. http://www.winehq.com/News/2000-37.html#0 4. http://linux.cnet.com/linux/0-2136864-7-4961586.html 5. mailto:ridgway(a)winehq.com 6. mailto:pouech(a)winehq.com 7. mailto:ovek(a)winehq.com

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