WINE for Mac OS X in Development

TylerL82 writes "The Darwine Project aims to get WINE up and running through X11 on Mac OS X/Darwin. According to the site, WINE itself compiles rather well, and they'll be using Bochs for the actual x86 emulation. Quite an interesting idea. It's crazy, but it just might work!"

Comments

Bochs?

[CODiNE]

I don't know where all this Bochs talk is coming from. I checked the FAQ and looked around some links and never saw it mentioned. QEMU on the other hand seems to be what they're putting in the official release. Maybe Bochs is in there for now for compatibility reasons. QEMU is waaaay faster than bochs, I can't wait til this is packaged up in a DMG that I can recommend to my OS X buddies.

Re:Two things

[g_lightyear]

Not necessarily. The technology being chosen is a combination of native code - which can do any necessary 'transitions' to a 'normal' endian mechanism at the API boundary between WINE and the application - and the emulator in question.

The emulator in question is based on something similar to the FX! Alpha code recompiler; it provides an execution environment, yes, but also dynamically recompiles code into native.

Between the core Windows libraries being "native" (in that they're wine lib, and therefore PPC-compiled native on OSX, not native x86) and the remainder in this 'recompiled' code execution environment, it's possible to strip out much of the endian issues.

Not saying they will - only that there's a lot of room to manoeuvre here.

Free.fr, where the project is hosted, is (of course) being slashdotted.

One of the performance metrics lists the QEMU version of gzip (x86 on PPC) being 5 times slower than native (for example) - and comparison to bochs put bochs well behind (however, qemu had no MMU emulation).