9 ms·
I wonder if Wine is now capable of running more Windows software than any one version of Windows is?
by jl6 9y ago
I wonder if Wine is now capable of running more Windows software than any one version of Windows is?
- shmerl 9y agoWine is surely better at running old Windows programs than Windows itself. Especially ones that use 16-bit code.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoI'm curious how WINE accomplishes that, since my understanding was that the reason it can't be done on Windows x64 is because there is no way to switch the processor back to 16 bit mode from long mode. Is this incorrect or does WINE just go ahead and emulate 16 bit x86?
- jandrese 9y agoIIRC Wine is still typically installed as a i386 binary these days, so 16 bit compatibility is still an option.
- chungy 9y ago64-bit Wine prefixes are perfectly capable of running Windows programs in all varieties from 16-, 32-, and 64-bit.
- leeter 9y agoIIRC 16bit code on a 32bit version of windows runs in 32bit mode with some thunking for selectors. The issue is more that HANDLEs can have values up to half the sizeof(HANDLE) and supporting 16bit would have significantly harmed the value of 64bit code or required special consideration of where a HANDLE was getting allocated. Then you have to deal with a 64bit process creating a HANDLE and giving it to a 16bit process. Very quickly it turns into a corner case nightmare.
- chocolatebunny 9y agoDo you have a source for that? running 16 bit code in 32bit mode doesn't sound like it would work. All the instructions would do 32bit operations instead of 16bit operations. So if a program did what it thought was a 16bit write to a memory location it would actually end up doing a 32bit write and would clobber the adjacent 16bit memory location.
- eesmith 9y agoI know nothing about the topic. I'll only point out that https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36664 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36664 says ".. the reality in the past the 16 bit code was not a issue because the [Linux] kernel always supported it." and "...3.15 after 16 bit support by [Linux] kernel is optional on 64 bit systems." That links to lmkl posts like https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/14/207 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/14/207 >> Afaik 64-bit windows doesn't support 16-bit binaries, so I just assumed Wine wouldn't do it either on x86-64. Not for any real technical reasons, though. > Yes, there is still a significant number of users, and we still regularly get bug reports about specific 16-bit apps. It would be really nice if we could continue to support them on x86-64, particularly since Microsoft doesn't ;-)
- leeter 9y agoI would not be surprised to see MS introduce a dockerized '16bit compatibility' mode for Enterprise versions of windows. The only reason 32bit windows is still around is to support 16bit apps for these companies.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago> The only reason 32bit windows is still around is to support 16bit apps for these companies. Pretty sure it's also used in some Atom tablets.
- monocasa 9y ago
- makomk 9y agoIf I recall correctly, you can still switch the processor to 16-bit mode but virtual 8086 mode is not available from x86-64. So more recent 16-bit Windows applications can be made to work but DOS applications and older 16-bit Windows applications that rely on more legacy DOS-style APIs don't work.
- merb 9y agowell which is probably only possible if you don't run on efi only hardware. (no cs/m, which sometimes happens, especially on mac hardware)
- JdeBP 9y agoThe actual machine firmware has been irrelevant for v8086 ever since the time of OS/2 2.0 and DOS-Windows 3.1. Both used virtualized machine firmwares to run in the v8086 virtual machines. OS/2's was dealt with by a virtual device driver called VBIOS.SYS, for example.
- lloeki 9y agoThis is precisely why DOSBox took a significant performance hit when going from x86 to amd64 back in the day.
- JdeBP 9y agoThe "older 16-bit Windows applications" (actually a misnomer because there isn't this distinction in practice) actually used DPMI, which does not involve v8086 mode.
- jklehm 9y agowine-devel discussion around 16bit support[1]. [1]https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2017-January/115942.html https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2017-January/115...
- shmerl 9y agoApparently it's a Windows limitation, rather than hardware one, since Linux supports it on x86_64. It got broken at one point, but then Linux kernel developers enabled it back, with even Linus Torvalds himself inquiring about this issue. See https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/14/207 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/14/207
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y agoIf you stretch your definition to problematic but usabile, it’s certainly true for recent versions of Windows. Moreover, it’s likely been true for a few years!
- wadkar 9y ago> If you stretch your definition to problematic but usable, One common example of a use case for wine is games, so maybe we can measure it as the number of games wine has it in its database over the years. > it’s certainly true for recent versions of Windows. Sounds very much likely given the fact that D3D 11 is now supported. D3D was an enabler or catalyst if you could call it like that, for the games and GPU industry. Who knows what’s in store with UWP There were other enablers as well like infiniband networks. I wonder what the performance currently is in the niche market of HPCs with infnibands enabling RDMA networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDMA_over_Converged_Ethernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDMA_over_Converged_Ethernet
- pera 9y agoFor everything previous to XP (and maybe even including XP) it is, without any doubt. It would be funny if someday Microsoft decides to include Wine with WSL, but I wouldn't be surprised to be honest.
- freeone3000 9y agoIt's not bundled, but it works.
- Y_Y 9y agoYou don't need it for WSL, wWine can already run on Windows natively: http://www.kegel.com/wine/wow.html http://www.kegel.com/wine/wow.html
- yorby 9y agoWindows might become a Linux distribution someday, the way it's going...
- JdeBP 9y agoVery unlikely. Linux distributions are based upon Linux, and the whole architecture of the Windows Linux Subsystem, after all, is not having Linux there.
- simion314 9y agoI had issues playing TES Oblivion in Windows 10, I got black screens , I tried all workarounds I found on Google, in the end I got it working and with mods in Wine.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoSomething about your phrasing reminded me of the customer reviews for the "three wolves" t-shirt on Amazon [1]. Thanks for brightening my day! [1] https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Wolf-Short-Sleeve/product-reviews/B002HJ377A https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Wolf-Short-Sleeve/prod...
- simion314 9y agoplease let me know how can I improve my phrasing, what mistakes I made, I am not a native speaker so I am aware I can build my phrases in a weird way.
- devthane 9y agoJust trying to help. I'm not an English major or anything myself, but here is one issue I noticed. Don't overuse commas. After you get a complete idea out there, just end and start a new sentence. For example: "Please let me know how I can improve my phrasing and what mistakes I made. I am not a native speaker, so I am aware I can build my phrases in a weird way."
- simion314 9y agoGood to know, thanks.
- AareyBaba 9y agoThe book that really help me gain confidence in writing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style. It is a small book that can be read in an afternoon - you can probably find pdfs online.
- SwellJoe 9y agoI was just marveling at how well Wine+Linux works with my old music and audio hardware. A lot of my old gear hasn't had functional Windows drivers since XP...but, Linux picks it right up. And, a few days ago I thought, "What the heck, let's see if the sysex editor/librarian for this old beast will work in Wine?" And, it did! It saw that the driver wasn't the official driver from the manufacturer (since it was the ALSA driver) when starting and it warned about it, but it still worked, and still detected the device and loaded up all the patches and such. Historically for these abandoned devices, I'd just use MIDI for communicating with it; since MIDI hasn't changed in decades, it all continues to work just fine (in Windows and Linux). But, it's certainly convenient to just plugin the synth itself via USB and have it all Just Work. But, yeah, to speak to your point: There are mountains of old software (and hardware!) that won't work on Windows anymore, but will run fine on Linux with Wine. That's pretty amazing to me. I couldn't believe how smooth it all was; I remember spelunking docs for hours to figure out how to make things work. Now, I just run the installer (or just run "wine app.exe") and there it is. I'm sure there are exceptions, but damned if I'm not still impressed. I rarely consider any program important enough to reboot to use it, since I'm most comfortable and productive in Linux, and Wine becoming so good over the past few years makes it even less of an issue. I still keep a Windows partition on my laptop, Just In Case, but I haven't needed it in months.
- samplatt 9y agoI'm getting a new laptop soon to start tinkering a bit more with my keyboard and a synth, and I'm considering a Macbook for the first time in my life based on a recent HN article regarding latency. Have you found that a linux machine has noticable latency when playing/recording music and applying filters?
- SwellJoe 9y agoLinux is not ideal for recording audio, but it has improved remarkably in recent years. It used to require a bunch of kernel patching to get low latency recording (though once you jumped through those hoops, it was lower latency than most Windows environments), but now most of those patches have been mainlined, and you just have to add your user to the realtime group on your system to allow JACK to use realtime scheduling. I don't notice the latency, but I also haven't measured it, and I just do it as a hobby, so spending some of my time tinkering with quirky stuff is fine (though it's not really that quirky anymore...tons of stuff Just Works). If it were my job, I would probably consider a mac. It's not; my job is software, where Linux is the clear winner. But, I don't think it's nearly as clear as it used to be that Linux isn't suitable for pro audio work. I think a reasonable person might give it a try, whereas five (or ten, or twenty, which is when I first started poking at audio on Linux) years ago it would have been madness to try to do real audio work on Linux.