Greetings -
I'm interested in porting Wine to run in native x86_64 mode, and was wondering if anyone had attempted to do such a thing already? I notice that there does not appear to be any support in CVS to do this, but figured that perhaps someone else is already undertaking such an effort.
My main motivation for doing so has to do with video driver support, in that the 32bit "emulated" applications are unable to use the 64bit 3D accelerated drivers, and fall back to software rendering - which is less than ideal. While this may eventually be resolved by the device drivers, I'd rather not wait for them.
Any comments, or hints as to what needs to be done (other than the obvious compile time fixes) would be appreciated. I've got software development experience, but none porting code from a 32bit architecture to a 64bit one.
Thanks!
Sean.
Sean Kormilo sean@kormilo.ca writes:
I'm interested in porting Wine to run in native x86_64 mode, and was wondering if anyone had attempted to do such a thing already? I notice that there does not appear to be any support in CVS to do this, but figured that perhaps someone else is already undertaking such an effort.
My main motivation for doing so has to do with video driver support, in that the 32bit "emulated" applications are unable to use the 64bit 3D accelerated drivers, and fall back to software rendering - which is less than ideal. While this may eventually be resolved by the device drivers, I'd rather not wait for them.
I hope you realize that a 64-bit Wine is not going to let you run Win32 binaries, so it will only solve your problem if you have either a Win64 version of your app, or a Winelib app. But as long as you are aware of that, by all means go ahead, I don't think anybody else is working on that at the moment.
I hope you realize that a 64-bit Wine is not going to let you run Win32 binaries, so it will only solve your problem if you have either a Win64 version of your app, or a Winelib app. But as long as you are aware of that, by all means go ahead, I don't think anybody else is working on that at the moment.
Alexandre,
Thanks for your perspective. Is this largely because WINE is not an emulator? I would have thought it possible to have WINE itself compiled as a 64 bit application (such that it can pick up and use 64 bit linux libraries), but still represent itself as a 32 bit environment for the windows binaries. But, you know way more about it than I do - if you say that isn't possible, then I won't bother starting.
Sean.
"Sean Kormilo" sean@kormilo.ca writes:
Thanks for your perspective. Is this largely because WINE is not an emulator? I would have thought it possible to have WINE itself compiled as a 64 bit application (such that it can pick up and use 64 bit linux libraries), but still represent itself as a 32 bit environment for the windows binaries. But, you know way more about it than I do - if you say that isn't possible, then I won't bother starting.
Well, it would be possible, but it would require adding a translation layer for every single API call, which would be a huge task for very little benefit. It's much easier to do it at the syscall level.
-
Alexandre Julliard -
Sean Kormilo