Hi, in the quest for speed parity in multimedia applications TransGaming has investigated a few options in dealing with the nasty overhead of the present wineserver implementation. I have just recently posted a prototype patch for a shared memory wineserver, to the ReWind project, (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1413925&forum_id=...) which, in a small benchmarking suite, has shown some remarkable performance gains. The concept for the shm wineserver came about during discussions at the OLS in 2002 and remained a concept until a little while ago we had enough time to create a working prototype.
TransGaming is donating this code to the ReWind project in the hopes that it will encourage other Wine developers to continue to share code under the more open BSD/X11 style license and to help overcome the remaining issues with this approach.
Rather than make a really long technical email, we decided that a bit of a paper would be more appropriate (it also has links to the patches). The paper can be found at http://www.transgaming.com/papers/shmserver.html
Regards, Peter Hunnisett peter@transgaming.com