New subject: wine on Alpha (was: Help needed)

13 Jun 2001


      I'm sorry for not answering earlier.
I saw your message but I didn't have time to
answer it at the time and then a forgot about it.
In truth I wasn't very eager about answering either since
I have answered far to many people that just asked questions
and then didn't contribute anything because I guess that
they felt it was to difficult or to much work.
I didn't notice that you were from Digital either,
but after reading Kernel Cousin Wine #97 I was made
aware of that fact.
While it is possible that you are yet another of those
people I talked about above, since you are from Digital
I will take some time to answer your questions.
Note however that I'm not at all unwilling to answer questions.
It is just that it has felt like a wasted effort in the past.
...
We are planning to port wine onto Tru64 Unix. I have some 
basic Questions.
OK. Sound good.
...
Can you tell me how to go about it.
Yes. But it is better if you ask more specific questions.
...
How do we start.
You try to get it to compile and link.
This shouldn't be to difficult.
While I never used Tru64 I expect it
supports all things Wine will need.
...
How big 
is the task and
Well, if you want the emulator (Wine) to work it
will be a humongous task, since you will have to
emulate x86 instructions on the Alpha among other
things.
However if you just want the porting tool (Winelib)
to work it will be a little easier.
Still, you must be aware of a few thing.
* Wine is not 100% byte order clean.
  However there have been some attempts to
  port it to Sparc which is big endian so
  don't if I think it is that bad and
  the remaining problems can be fixed without
  to much effort.
* Wine is not 64 bit clean.
  This is a little worse especially since
  Win32 often stores pointers in 32 bit integers
  and this problem really can't be solved in
  a good way, since extending the size of the storage
  is not possible at least not if you want to
  be able to implement a x86 emulator in the
  future. However I guess it will be possible
  to force all memory usage to be in the lower
  32 bits of memory to be able to cope with
  truncated pointers.
* Then of course you have Tru64 specific problem.
  However I don't expect them to be so bad.
...
how to start about it..
Well as I said. Try to compile and link it.
Then try to get some of the simple examples
in wine/programs to run.

RE: Help needed