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From my limited understanding stemming from a passing interest of such things: that sounds similar to how WINE operates, is it not?

by barbs 7y ago

ObscureScience 7y ago
WINE is not emulating/translating instructions to a diffrent ISA. It rather has a win32 loader and inserts some shims to map some calls to windows library functions and others to native(as in host ex. Linux). That's how I understand it. You can however theoretically run x86 WINE to run a x86 windows binary on ARM with Qemu user emulation.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  Doesn’t WINE support 16-bit emulation for Win311-stuff because you can’t run 16-bit code in x64 mode? Or was that a Windows limitation?
  - monocasa 7y ago
    That's a Windows limitation. X64 chips are plenty capable of running 16-bit protected mode code while the OS runs in long mode. It's that Windows didn't want to deal with translating HANDLEs back and forth between the two modes.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    Not to my knowledge, I believe WINE targets Windows 95 and newer. There is no ISA emulation, just DLL and other related Windows emulation.
  - chungy 7y ago
    Wine has never ran 16-bit Windows programs in 16-bit mode. They are instead translated to 32-bit at runtime using some magic, especially using 32-bit addresses to emulate 16-bit real mode.
nwallin 7y ago
Sort of. Wine impersonates OS calls, (including syscalls) but does not perform emulation on the binary itself. Wine can only run windows applications written for x86, but not windows applications written for itanium. This appears to be running both hardware emulation on the supplied binary, (which is what VMware/KVM/virtualbox etc do) as well as wine-like OS impersonation. I made up the word "impersonates" for what wine does just to avoid confusion. It's not a word that's used in the literature afaik, although perhaps it (or a word like it) should be.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  I think the usual term Wine (plus e.g. WSL1, Darling, Solaris/BSD Linux compatibility shims, etc.) uses is "translate", but "impersonate" does sound closer to what such systems actually do.
  - Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
    Speaking of Wine, you can actually run x86 Wine using QEMU on a Raspberry Pi and run Windows software with it. You essentially chroot into an x86 Debian environment that's running with QEMU, then install Wine in there and run it. There's a product called 'ExaGear Desktop' which makes the process pretty seamless from what I hear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZ5UiQyeFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZ5UiQyeFA

From my limited understanding stemming from a passing interest of such things: that sounds similar to how WINE operates, is it not?

by barbs 7y ago

From my limited understanding stemming from a passing interest of such things: that sounds similar to how WINE operates, is it not?

ObscureScience 7y ago

WINE is not emulating/translating instructions to a diffrent ISA. It rather has a win32 loader and inserts some shims to map some calls to windows library functions and others to native(as in host ex. Linux). That's how I understand it. You can however theoretically run x86 WINE to run a x86 windows binary on ARM with Qemu user emulation.

DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
Doesn’t WINE support 16-bit emulation for Win311-stuff because you can’t run 16-bit code in x64 mode? Or was that a Windows limitation?
- monocasa 7y ago
  That's a Windows limitation. X64 chips are plenty capable of running 16-bit protected mode code while the OS runs in long mode. It's that Windows didn't want to deal with translating HANDLEs back and forth between the two modes.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  Not to my knowledge, I believe WINE targets Windows 95 and newer. There is no ISA emulation, just DLL and other related Windows emulation.
- chungy 7y ago
  Wine has never ran 16-bit Windows programs in 16-bit mode. They are instead translated to 32-bit at runtime using some magic, especially using 32-bit addresses to emulate 16-bit real mode.

nwallin 7y ago

Sort of. Wine impersonates OS calls, (including syscalls) but does not perform emulation on the binary itself. Wine can only run windows applications written for x86, but not windows applications written for itanium. This appears to be running both hardware emulation on the supplied binary, (which is what VMware/KVM/virtualbox etc do) as well as wine-like OS impersonation. I made up the word "impersonates" for what wine does just to avoid confusion. It's not a word that's used in the literature afaik, although perhaps it (or a word like it) should be.

yellowapple 7y ago
I think the usual term Wine (plus e.g. WSL1, Darling, Solaris/BSD Linux compatibility shims, etc.) uses is "translate", but "impersonate" does sound closer to what such systems actually do.
- Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  Speaking of Wine, you can actually run x86 Wine using QEMU on a Raspberry Pi and run Windows software with it. You essentially chroot into an x86 Debian environment that's running with QEMU, then install Wine in there and run it. There's a product called 'ExaGear Desktop' which makes the process pretty seamless from what I hear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZ5UiQyeFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZ5UiQyeFA