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Old 19th February 2014
thirdm thirdm is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 248
Default porting wine to OpenBSD?

Quote:
Originally Posted by ibara View Post
The next time you feel the need to complain about OpenBSD not having a port/package for something, don't. Instead, go read the Porter's Handbook and write up the port yourself. It's really not all that difficult and it's OK if your first couple of ports really aren't that good. You will get helpful comments back and you will get better at writing up ports. And then, magically, that thing you were gonna complain about will be supported by OpenBSD.

Anybody can write up a port. Yes, it's work. But anything worthwhile is work. And you just might find that you enjoy it. And at least then you can say you tried, even if it fails. That's a lot more useful than just complaining. And maybe, just maybe, you'll prevent someone else from complaining in the future.
Wine will be difficult.

I took a stab at it years ago, fixed a couple superficial compile errors but then it got hard. I don't recall the details, but someone else who was working a little on it wrote something about differences with mmap and wine wanting to put things at a fixed address or something like that. Windows makes assumption about how virtual memory is laid out IIRC (e.g. > 2GB belongs to kernel, depending on certain settings, including settings compiled into the application binary!). Seems to me there were issues then with lack of kernel threads then too, which shouldn't be an issue now (though maybe there's some work to port to OpenBSD's threads?).

FreeBSD did it because someone did the work for FreeBSD. You can probably look at their mailing lists to gauge how much work it is. Then again there may be things in OpenBSD that make it harder, I don't know.

I've had the thought to try again sometime, but now I'm running amd64. I'm not sure 64 bit windows support is worth anything to me. For that matter, I'm not sure how well wine works with 64 bit programs. Running win32 wine on amd64 I think will always be impossible. Unless I'm mistaken, OpenBSD has made the design decision never to support 32 bit programs on amd64 arch. IMO that's good. When I used slackware I found annoying little complications and clutter caused by the need to support both kinds of binaries, e.g. the names of the library directories. Why even bother when you have the source and can recompile/port? I can see it if all you have is binaries but that's not a use case worth spending much effort to support IMO.

But by all means give it a shot. If you do make sure to scan the ports mailing lists for past efforts and make sure you're starting with all patches done before. I don't know if everything is in the current port or not.

Last edited by thirdm; 19th February 2014 at 04:24 PM. Reason: win32 -> windows. i.e. I meant 64 bit windows applications in that sentence.
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