Wine Patches Cleaned Up, Out For Review On Very Early POWER 64-Bit Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine Patches Cleaned Up, Out For Review On Very Early POWER 64-Bit Support

With the Raptor Blackbird popular among open-source enthusiasts for a libre 64-bit Linux desktop compute and that getting more POWER9 hardware out in the wild, more users are interested in seeing Wine work for 64-bit POWER hardware. Last year was some early porting work done by Raptor Computing Systems but now a cleaned up patch series has been sent out with this very primitive PPC64 work...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WINE-POWER64-Patches-2020

[yoshi314]

As outlined on the Raptor Wiki, their motivation is on seeing Winelib support working on POWER9 for being able to build open-source projects targeting Windows and able to rely upon Winelib.

i am not exactly sure what the intent is. It's mean to enable running of opensource apps on this platform, so i assume there are some killer opensource windows apps out there that might be recompiled and ran via wine. But what are those exactly?

[tildearrow]

Can I run my 10 Windows NT 4.0 PowerPC programs using this?


....wow. This won't come in handy until they implement x86 emulation/JIT recompilation/something.

[zexelon]

As said above... I am really interested to know the use case here?! If there is a way to run x86 windows programs on a Power9 system that would be beyond amazing... and as far as I know well beyond the current state of the art.

[stormcrow]

As said above... I am really interested to know the use case here?! If there is a way to run x86 windows programs on a Power9 system that would be beyond amazing... and as far as I know well beyond the current state of the art.

That would be kinda against that "Wine is not an emulator" schtick they've had going for ages now. Wine as it stands would need something like QEMU under it... and that would just about kill any reasonable performance.

[jacob]

i am not exactly sure what the intent is. It's mean to enable running of opensource apps on this platform, so i assume there are some killer opensource windows apps out there that might be recompiled and ran via wine. But what are those exactly?

There is a wealth of Windows-only open source apps. From the top of my head: Virtualdub, KeePass, Sumatra PDF etc. But this can also be useful for developers. It simply opens up the Windows APIs for use on Linux, no more, no less.

[stormcrow]

This basically says to Windows open source developers and those that may be interested in more native level cross platform developers for Win32 - not .NET devs, that's Mono/.NET Core (which Keepass2 would be one) - If you're interested in porting your Windows software to Linux platforms OTHER than x86_64 then we'll try to make it easier for you with Wine support. If anyone is really interested in doing such a thing is another matter entirely.

As it is, without an emulator layer for the hardware, as I said above, you're not going to get very far with native Win32 on POWER. It would still take a lot of work for any non-trivial program to port from native WinIntel on top of Wine-POWER even with hardware support in the libraries.

[microcode]

I'm impressed if it's the NT on POWER users, of which there were like five.

[Snaipersky]

Get winelib running, and get to a point akin to windows on ARM - translate the system calls directly, assembly and arch-specific stuff is emulated. So basically Hangover.

[oiaohm]

As said above... I am really interested to know the use case here?! If there is a way to run x86 windows programs on a Power9 system that would be beyond amazing... and as far as I know well beyond the current state of the art.

People forgot wine on power pc mac os use to use qemu under wine. Performance is not great and you don't need native platform wine to pull this stunt. But its important to a newer stunt.

That would be kinda against that "Wine is not an emulator" schtick they've had going for ages now. Wine as it stands would need something like QEMU under it... and that would just about kill any reasonable performance.

Not quite. Wine is not emulator that is true. But wine gets into some horrible places with qemu usermode emulation.

https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover

Hangover is interesting fork project this still need a functional host wine so that you can thunk out to host so you don't need to emulate everything. So you need QEMU under it or in the middle of it somehow. Hangover is in the middle of it with wine on both sides of the qemu emulator.

This basically says to Windows open source developers and those that may be interested in more native level cross platform developers for Win32 - not .NET devs, that's Mono/.NET Core (which Keepass2 would be one) - If you're interested in porting your Windows software to Linux platforms OTHER than x86_64 then we'll try to make it easier for you with Wine support. If anyone is really interested in doing such a thing is another matter entirely.

As it is, without an emulator layer for the hardware, as I said above, you're not going to get very far with native Win32 on POWER. It would still take a lot of work for any non-trivial program to port from native WinIntel on top of Wine-POWER even with hardware support in the libraries.

Stormcrow ppc64 wine is still interest to .net developers. There are lot of .net libraries that call out to windows by pinvoke of course .net programs doing this fail under Linux Mono/.Net Core running on Linux native. Interesting point is if you could get winemono or mono to build lot of these programs would in fact run with wine providing the stuff because those applications don't care that the platform is not x86 as long as their pinvokes work.

.net applications are not exactly native. There are also java programs in the same camp with the JINI.