Low-level coding

[Aaron Slunt]

Hi,

I was interested in starting to play with wine and maybe even build a few
functions for it...but then I realized that it's low-level coding, something
I'm not familiar with (higher level is more of my expertise). Correct me if
I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S. Does anyone  have any
good places to go to to learn about low-level coding, and afterwards coding
for wine specifically?

Thanks.

[Damjan Jovanovic]

--- Aaron Slunt  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was interested in starting to play with wine and
> maybe even build a few
> functions for it...but then I realized that it's
> low-level coding, something
> I'm not familiar with (higher level is more of my
> expertise). Correct me if
> I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S.

Look at a few of the main DLLs (eg. kernel), the
loader and wineserver code is complex. COM DLLs (eg.
directx) are undecipherable unless you know COM.
> Does anyone  have any
> good places to go to to learn about low-level
> coding, and afterwards coding
> for wine specifically?

There's some useful coding hints for wine at
www.wine-wiki.org. The developer's cheatsheet, and the
wine dev guide are also helpful.

You learn the most by doing it :-).
> Thanks.

Good luck
Damjan
> -- 
> Tired of being hammered by spyware, or want to
> browse the internet in a
> whole new way? Download Firefox and enjoy a much
> better internet experience.
> http://getfirefox.com/
> >

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[Saulius Krasuckas]

* On Sun, 10 Sep 2006, Aaron Slunt wrote:
> I was interested in starting to play with wine and maybe even build a 
> few functions for it...but then I realized that it's low-level coding, 
> something I'm not familiar with (higher level is more of my expertise). 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S.

You are welcome! :)
Can you refer to exact file names your were looking at?
> Does anyone have any good places to go to to learn about low-level 
> coding, and afterwards coding for wine specifically?

For me Wine embraces libs for quite wide spectra of functions and not so 
few ioctls:

$ grep -rI "ioctl[^a-zA-Z0-9]*(" dlls/ | wc -l
  276

$ grep -rIc "ioctl[^a-zA-Z0-9]*(" dlls/ | grep -v :0
  dlls/avicap32/avicap32_main.c:4
  dlls/dinput/joystick_linux.c:10
  dlls/dinput/joystick_linuxinput.c:7
  dlls/dinput/effect_linuxinput.c:2
  dlls/iphlpapi/ifenum.c:9
  dlls/kernel/comm.c:4
  dlls/kernel/sync.c:1
  dlls/kernel/oldconfig.c:1
  dlls/ntdll/cdrom.c:57
  dlls/ntdll/directory.c:7
  dlls/ntdll/file.c:1
  dlls/ntdll/serial.c:10
  dlls/ntdll/tape.c:11
  dlls/qcap/v4l.c:17
  dlls/winedos/int13.c:1
  dlls/winedos/ppdev.c:8
  dlls/winmm/joystick/joystick.c:4
  dlls/winmm/wineaudioio/audio.c:6
  dlls/winmm/wineoss/audio.c:61
  dlls/winmm/wineoss/dscapture.c:11
  dlls/winmm/wineoss/dsrender.c:15
  dlls/winmm/wineoss/midi.c:5
  dlls/winmm/wineoss/mixer.c:17
  dlls/winmm/wineoss/mmaux.c:3
  dlls/wnaspi32/aspi.c:2
  dlls/ws2_32/socket.c:2

As for me, low level coding is writing a device driver for linux kernel 
:-] and using it from the Wine code.

But there is also a bunch of hardware platform specific issues also, like 
advanced signal handling which may be needed for example to make remote 
process operations work [1] or to implement ntoskrnl and make safedisc 
work [2].

All that stuff needs knowledge of glibc programming at least, I guess.  
So maybe you should read recent libc.pdf if you are interested into this 
area?

Also, some guys are working on DCOM/OLE stuff [3] which seems to be quite 
low level for me sometimes (wire-protocol compatibility).

Going further (upper?) most of Wine code tries to use WinAPI, which I 
doubt should be considered as low-level.  To get into basic Wine coding it 
may be usefull to review Janitorial Projects [4] and maybe to hang on one 
of it? :)

Without naming exact Wine component or functionality you are interested in 
I doubt someone will answer you more specifically :-P

[1] http://wiki.winehq.org/RemoteProcessOperations
[2] http://wiki.winehq.org/VitaliyMargolen
[3] http://wiki.winehq.org/RobShearman
[4] http://wiki.winehq.org/JanitorialProjects

[Aaron Slunt]

Saulius Krasuckas wrote:
> - On Sun, 10 Sep 2006, Aaron Slunt wrote:
> > I was interested in starting to play with wine and maybe even build a 
> > few functions for it...but then I realized that it's low-level coding, 
> > something I'm not familiar with (higher level is more of my expertise). 
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S.
>
> You are welcome! :)
> Can you refer to exact file names your were looking at?
> > Does anyone have any good places to go to to learn about low-level 
> > coding, and afterwards coding for wine specifically?
>
> For me Wine embraces libs for quite wide spectra of functions and not so 
> few ioctls:
>
> $ grep -rI "ioctl[^a-zA-Z0-9]*(" dlls/ | wc -l
>   276
>
> $ grep -rIc "ioctl[^a-zA-Z0-9]*(" dlls/ | grep -v :0
>   dlls/avicap32/avicap32_main.c:4
>   dlls/dinput/joystick_linux.c:10
>   dlls/dinput/joystick_linuxinput.c:7
>   dlls/dinput/effect_linuxinput.c:2
>   dlls/iphlpapi/ifenum.c:9
>   dlls/kernel/comm.c:4
>   dlls/kernel/sync.c:1
>   dlls/kernel/oldconfig.c:1
>   dlls/ntdll/cdrom.c:57
>   dlls/ntdll/directory.c:7
>   dlls/ntdll/file.c:1
>   dlls/ntdll/serial.c:10
>   dlls/ntdll/tape.c:11
>   dlls/qcap/v4l.c:17
>   dlls/winedos/int13.c:1
>   dlls/winedos/ppdev.c:8
>   dlls/winmm/joystick/joystick.c:4
>   dlls/winmm/wineaudioio/audio.c:6
>   dlls/winmm/wineoss/audio.c:61
>   dlls/winmm/wineoss/dscapture.c:11
>   dlls/winmm/wineoss/dsrender.c:15
>   dlls/winmm/wineoss/midi.c:5
>   dlls/winmm/wineoss/mixer.c:17
>   dlls/winmm/wineoss/mmaux.c:3
>   dlls/wnaspi32/aspi.c:2
>   dlls/ws2_32/socket.c:2
>
> As for me, low level coding is writing a device driver for linux kernel 
> :-] and using it from the Wine code.
>
> But there is also a bunch of hardware platform specific issues also, like 
> advanced signal handling which may be needed for example to make remote 
> process operations work [1] or to implement ntoskrnl and make safedisc 
> work [2].
>
> All that stuff needs knowledge of glibc programming at least, I guess.  
> So maybe you should read recent libc.pdf if you are interested into this 
> area?
>
> Also, some guys are working on DCOM/OLE stuff [3] which seems to be quite 
> low level for me sometimes (wire-protocol compatibility).
>
> Going further (upper?) most of Wine code tries to use WinAPI, which I 
> doubt should be considered as low-level.  To get into basic Wine coding it 
> may be usefull to review Janitorial Projects [4] and maybe to hang on one 
> of it? :)
>
> Without naming exact Wine component or functionality you are interested in 
> I doubt someone will answer you more specifically :-P
>
> [1] http://wiki.winehq.org/RemoteProcessOperations
> [2] http://wiki.winehq.org/VitaliyMargolen
> [3] http://wiki.winehq.org/RobShearman
> [4] http://wiki.winehq.org/JanitorialProjects

Thanks all for the replies. I took note to the JanitorialProjects page, 
and found the DllCanUnloadNow project.

I wrote a patch for the dinput.c one, to start with getting familiar 
with wine's code, and it compiles fine, but I have no way (at least know 
of a way) of testing if the implementation actually works or not. It 
looks like it should, and it compiles, but I don't know for sure how to 
test it out...I've skimmed through the wiki, but I need some human help 
as well :(

And I guess I really meant "lower-level" coding, C looks scary as I'm 
not familiar with it and it looks more complex than other languages like 
Java, but the same syntax makes it a lot easier :O

Thanks for the support, makes things much easier :)

[Kuba Ober]

> I was interested in starting to play with wine and maybe even build a few
> functions for it...but then I realized that it's low-level coding,

What do you mean by low-level?
> Correct me if I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S.

Are you looking at assembly files? Those have .S extension. Methinks you 
should focus on the C sources first, which have .c extension.

Cheers, Kuba

[Frank Richter]

On 11.09.2006 15:24, Kuba Ober wrote:
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S.
>
> Are you looking at assembly files? Those have .S extension. Methinks you 
> should focus on the C sources first, which have .c extension.

":S" might've been an emoticon here.

-f.r.

[Kuba Ober]

On Monday 11 September 2006 12:12, Frank Richter wrote:
> On 11.09.2006 15:24, Kuba Ober wrote:
> > > Correct me if I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S.
> >
> > Are you looking at assembly files? Those have .S extension. Methinks you
> > should focus on the C sources first, which have .c extension.
>
> ":S" might've been an emoticon here.

Thought about that, a quick google for :S didn't show up anything interesting.

Cheers, Kuba

[Kai Blin]

On Monday 11 September 2006 22:58, Kuba Ober wrote:
> On Monday 11 September 2006 12:12, Frank Richter wrote:

[...]
> > ":S" might've been an emoticon here.
>
> Thought about that, a quick google for :S didn't show up anything
> interesting.

According to [1], it's a "contratidcory remark" smiley.

Cheers,

Kai

[1] David Sanderson, "Smileys" , O'Reilly, 1993

[hendric]

Hi,Slunt
    Hmm as my thought you'd better read something about windows kernel technology. If you got difficult in assembly , which I thought the very low-level coding you refered to , to have a look at books about assembly maybe the best choice. But I still think windows kernel technology should be most important.
    Cheers!
------------------				 
hendric
2006-09-13

-------------------------------------------------------------
发件人：Aaron Slunt
发送日期：2006-09-11 08:01:07
收件人：[e-mail]
抄送：
主题：Low-level coding

Hi,

I was interested in starting to play with wine and maybe even build a few
functions for it...but then I realized that it's low-level coding, something
I'm not familiar with (higher level is more of my expertise). Correct me if
I'm wrong, I could be looking at the wrong files :S. Does anyone  have any
good places to go to to learn about low-level coding, and afterwards coding
for wine specifically?

Thanks.