I've been looking at the various efforts over the years to speed up wineserver or eliminate it altogether (by substituting a kernel service). Certainly the current degree of reliance on a separate process that is scheduled according to the operating system's own priorities creates significant speed problems. Some of this migh be alleviated by boosting the priority of the wineserver process or by making it a real time task, but there are still some operations it appears to be performing some operations that result in a yield and hence subject it to another wait in the queue for at least one time slice.
Even if the wineserver itself could be sped up in this way, individual processes would stull be subjected to time waiting in the queue after they make a request of wineserver. The problem becomes more severe on a heavily loaded system.
The approaches suggested so far:
Shared memory
Suffers from reliability problems which may allow one process to put the system in an inconsistent state.
Kernel module
The only effort so far seemed to put way too much into the kernel, and was abandoned over two years ago.
Other possible approaches that I haven't seen directly discussed on the wine-devel list:
An exokernel using the x86 multiring capability
Not portable to non-x86 architectures.
Cross-process calls
Also referred to under other names. This mechanism would allow one process to call into another process without giving up part of its time slice. Would require modifications to the kernel's scheduler and to standard kernel data structures, hence would have to be considered "rude". It would have one advantage in that the interface differences between this mechanism and the current mechanism could be transparent.
Have I missed any?
Anyway, I'm thinking that perhaps the kernel module approach was the right basic approach, but that the particular attempt made was merely too broad. A better approach would be to define a set of kernel calls that could be used to implement all of the other stuff (and there are currently 176 types of wineserver request, so I haven't taken the time to see if I've covered them all yet) in an in-process library.
Transparency substitution for wineserver would, I guess, be achieved by having the kernel module and its supporting library implement the wineserver requests using the wineserver data structures, and perhaps having wineserver use a non-kernel version of these facilities.
The following are things I could see immediately would be part of the kernel module:
winekernel_attach_to_kernel(char const *kernid);
winekernel_object winekernel_object_create( char const *name, void const *data, size_t size);
winekernel_object winekernel_object_open( char const *name);
int winekernel_object_close( winekernel_object obj);
int winekernel_object_namesize( winekernel_object obj);
int winekernel_object_getname( winekernel_object obj, char *name, size_t bufsize); size_t winekernel_object_size( winekernel_object obj);
int winekernel_object_getdata( winekernel_object obj, void *buffer, size_t bufsize);
int winekernel_object_setdata( winekernel_object obj, void *buffer, size_t bufsize, size_t offset);
int winekernel_object_lockobject( winekernel_object obj, int flags);
int winekernel_object_unlock( winekernel_object obj);
int winekernel_object_setacl( winekernel_object obj, wineserver_acl *acl);
int winekernel_object_attach_native_file( winekernel_object obj, int fd);
int winekernel_object_get_native_file( winekernel_object obj);
int winekernel_object_list( char *namespace, char *data, int bytes, int *bytesneeded, int flags);
There would be other things that would be in the "nice to have" category too (I'm thinking specifically about path name translation being done in a way that requires less seeks through the file system).
The way I see this working is that Wine kernel objects are stored (strangely enough) in kernel memory. This effectively amounts to a shared memory approach but with the kernel module able to clean up after a misbehaving process. In the event that cleanups after a misbehaving process were to be too complex, there would still be room for a server process that does this, and the kernel could simply assign ownership of the objects from the bad process to the server process, which gets notified via another set of calls when it receives the objects. The object name would be of the form "namespace:name", so as to have:
window:0431a9c4 file:/home/me/file.dat
A process could allow the kernel to assign the name within the namespace, so that, for example:
obj = winekernel_object_create("window", windowdata, windowdata_size); winekernel_object_gername(obj, achHWND, 15);
The idea behind the "wine_attach_to_kernel" call would be to allow for the kernel to serve either multiple different users or multiple different Windows operating system types without the objects from all of them being intermingled.