The State of Wine For ARM, MIPS, PowerPC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State of Wine For ARM, MIPS, PowerPC

Besides Wine switching to yearly releases and making Wine-Staging official, there were many other interesting sessions at this year's WineConf. One such session was discussing the state of Wine for alternative architectures...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-For-Alt-Archs

[schmidtbag]

I don't get it, I thought wine on these other architectures wasn't capable of running x86 Windows apps. To my knowledge, there has never been a form of Windows that works on PPC, and to my knowledge, MIPS has only had Windows CE. A good chunk of Windows MIPS apps have also been compiled for ARM. Personally, I think supporting MIPS and PPC is a waste of valuable man-power, but I could be wrong.

[LinuxID10T]

I don't get it, I thought wine on these other architectures wasn't capable of running x86 Windows apps. To my knowledge, there has never been a form of Windows that works on PPC, and to my knowledge, MIPS has only had Windows CE. A good chunk of Windows MIPS apps have also been compiled for ARM. Personally, I think supporting MIPS and PPC is a waste of valuable man-power, but I could be wrong.

No, unfortunately you are completely correct other than the MIPS thing. They had Windows NT on MIPS back in the day. Look up Microsoft Jazz.

[duby229]

I was under the impression it could use bochs or qemu to emulate x86, and in that way they could run x86 windows code. I don't know if that's true, I've never actually tried. I had just assumed because it's all I could think of that makes sense.

[Xaero_Vincent]

I was under the impression it could use bochs or qemu to emulate x86, and in that way they could run x86 windows code. I don't know if that's true, I've never actually tried. I had just assumed because it's all I could think of that makes sense.

That works but CPU emulation has big overhead. I remember reading about a commercial CPU emulation / binary translator product called Eltechs that claimed to be 4.5x faster than QEMU processor translation and they advertised that Wine could be used to run x86 applications. No 3D acceleration support, though.

[jacob]

I don't get it, I thought wine on these other architectures wasn't capable of running x86 Windows apps. To my knowledge, there has never been a form of Windows that works on PPC, and to my knowledge, MIPS has only had Windows CE. A good chunk of Windows MIPS apps have also been compiled for ARM. Personally, I think supporting MIPS and PPC is a waste of valuable man-power, but I could be wrong.

Windows NT was supported on PPC, MIPS and Alpha.

[pierce]

I am a PPC32 and PPC64 user. Does anyone know how I can directly keep this alive?

[DrYak]

Don't forget that wine has a second function:
*source* ports.

If you have the source code of a Windows program that only runs under windows because it uses windows only APIs, you can make it run under unix systems by recompiling the source using wine-gcc and it libraries. You get the same compatibility as if you were running the original windows binary under wine, but what you have in hand is a native linux executable. (Been there, done exactly that).

Wine for ARM32, MIPS etc. also mean that you can instantly get native binaries for these architecture by recompiling code normally targeting Windows machines.

[Passso]

Manager - Please find me a single use case for that or I fire you

Developer - Hmm.... Notepad on ARM tablets maybe?

Manager - Ok let's go!

-- The Open Source tragedy

[schmidtbag]

I am a PPC32 and PPC64 user. Does anyone know how I can directly keep this alive?

I'm sincerely curious - what do you personally run on wine for PPC? (either 32 or 64 bit)