Wine & non X86 processors

[Hetz Ben Hamo]

Hi,

A friend of mine who uses sparc machine wants to write a pentium emulator & 
use wine with it to run some apps...

His question is - are there any special notes about wine in big endian? does 
he need to make lots of changes? if so, in whats parts in general?

Thanks,
Hetz

[eric pouech]

> A friend of mine who uses sparc machine wants to write a pentium emulator &
> use wine with it to run some apps...
>
> His question is - are there any special notes about wine in big endian? does
> he need to make lots of changes? if so, in whats parts in general?

lots of work have been done already. wine has been ported (a while ago)
and
ran (as winelib) on PowerPC. So, the endianness shouldn't be too much of
an issue.
What should remain is:
- compiler: gcc stickiness
- disabling/getting rid of 16 bit code
- and of course, evolutions of the code since the port was (half)-done

A+

[Francois Gouget]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2002, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A friend of mine who uses sparc machine wants to write a pentium emulator &
> use wine with it to run some apps...
>
> His question is - are there any special notes about wine in big endian? does
> he need to make lots of changes? if so, in whats parts in general?

Note that if his intention is to run Windows applications, i.e. x86
applications, with Wine on Sparc, there are many more issues than just
compiling Wine on Sparc.
   For instance you will have to convert all the data structures (e.g.
messages) between little and big endian format each time you switch
between Wine and the application. You will also need to properly invoke
the emulator each time Wine invokes a callback. Some applications also
expect to be able to 'communicate' with the OS via interrupts, or other
very low level things and you will need a very tight integration between
the emulator and Wine to implement that. All this will require
widespread modifications in Wine's code.
   If you want to run x86 windows applications on Sparc, your best bet
is to run Wine itself in the CPU emulator. This way you don't even need
to worry about porting Wine to Sparc.

If on the other hand he wants to use Winelib to port Windows
applications to Sparc then he does not need a CPU emulator at all.

--
Francois Gouget         [e-mail]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                           La terre est une bêta...