Hi Scott,
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 1:39 AM, Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org wrote:
Is it at all feasible to run Windows mobile apps under Wine? From what I understand it's supposed to be largely the same API as standard Win32.
How about a port to ARM for the purpose of running Windows Mobile apps, or just recompiled Winelib apps?
I've played with this a bit from time to time and while not an expert, I can provide an overview of what its going to take.
- winelib might have some problems due to alignment asumptions in the existing code - of course winelib/wineserver/ntdll/etc need to have arm support added - prior to WinCE 4? I think the address space for each app was like 32Mb. With the current versions it has more of a normal win32 like layout with a 2GB private space. The reserved areas in its memory manager also differ than the normal win32 memory layout - threading is different on WinCE than it is on normal Win32. I think there may be asumptions in Wine code that would cause problems with existing windows mobile apps - You will need to implement the runtime libraries. It does not use user32/gdi32/kernel32 and friends but uses corelib.dll I think. I sent in a stub for this a long time ago and was able to get a really simple WinCE app to work under ReactOS using it. Wine was not as forgiving at the time.
Ubuntu is getting serious about its ARM port, so if Wine/ARM becomes a reality within the next, say, 2 years the potential for quickly developing mobile applications by just porting Windows ones is huge. Theoretically, we could run Windows applications on a jailbroken iPhone.
If you want to start now, we could try getting X86 WinCE apps working, that would get a good bit of the infrastructure in place for supporting Arm based WinCE and Windows Mobile.