Damjan Jovanovic wrote:
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 6:35 AM, Luis Busquets luis.busquets@ilidium.com wrote:
Could someone please confirm the following points?:
- Integration of DosBOX or other emulator. How this will be done? Is the
plan to use them when wine detects that the programme is compiled for real mode? Does that mean that the sake of wine is to provide compatibility only for applications built to be run on protected mode?
Just yesterday (http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-April/082983.html) I wrote that we don't need emulation even on 64-bit since we can still get into virtual 8086 mode using the http://v86-64.sourceforge.net project.
And yesterday ;) I wanted to reply that Wine cannot rely on that feature. That stuff is a kernel patch in the early stage. Provided that Linus is willing to accept that feature it is at least 2 kernel versions out; I see it earliest in 2.6.36 aka 1 year from now. And it will take another 6-12 month until that feature is generally available in Linux distributions. Also the non-Linux OSes would need to provide a similar functionality too.
In any case, a real mode DOS application can still switch into protected mode, and a 16-bit protected mode Windows 3.1 application can still call into DOS, so there's no escape from DOS in Wine :-).
16bit Windows applications do run in Wine on a 64bit OS without any need for VM86.
bye michael