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Wine vs Windows Benchmarks
PeterBrett writes "Tom Wickline recently posted to the Wine development list announcing that he'd done some benchmarks comparing Windows XP to Wine. They should be taken with the requisite dose of salt, but Wine has certainly come a long way."
We need real benchmarks! Get some Windows worms/viruses/trojans running on WINE and then we'll have some real-world benchmarks!
I say good day to you sir!
while i realise that postings to a dev list shouldn't be taken as gospel, why would a dev list posting of benchmarks be assumed to be doctored? of course i would expect this from a marketing dept, but a dev list?
chris
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
I've quite impressed with the performance of WINE, however these stats can be a little deceiving. These stats are based on a game that works. Getting the game to work in the first place can be quite a challenge. But for the part-time gamer that doesn't wanna be chained to Windows, this is a great alternative indeed!
http://religiousfreaks.com/The results aren't exactly surprising - Wine is excelling in what Linux is generally better than Windows in doing - memory management, hard drive speed, and related matters (stressing generally there, because of course different apps give different results). This is Gentoo after all, it's built for speed. Then the heavier the load on the video drivers the more the superiority of the Windows drivers takes hold, so for the graphical stuff things don't work as fast.
Congrats to the Wine devs!
ive been looking for an excuse to switch to linux.. i wonder if office 2003 will run under wine?
To me this seems to be more a test of the linux implementation of teh video card drivers.. and NOT the wine system itself.
i think a wider suite of tests would be required.. and not just the preformance/gaming orinted stuff.
-- Shoe Lace
Speaking as someone who used to be a Wine-hater, Wine has definitely come a long way. My impression of Wine for years was that it a) was impossible to install and configure, b) didn't run anything other than solitaire, and c) caused major instability to desktops.
Then I tried Codeweavers' "Crossover Office," essentially a pre-configured Wine with graphical configuration and installation tools, and everything changed. I currently use all of the following under Fedora Core 4:
- Microsoft Office XP
- Wordperfect 12 (word processor only)
- Photoshop 6
- Framemaker 7
They all installed using the standard CD install, without my having to jump through any crazy hoops or type a single command, and they all run flawlessly and are great for serious work. They sit right in my KDE menu like all other applications and it's a real head-turner to be able to show up to work with my laptop running Linux and then pop into Word XP and Framemaker.
Wine works incredibly well after all, it's just more "raw material" than "finished product." Get someone to write a user-friendly front end for it (ala Codeweavers' Crossover Office) and it offers a very high level of Windows compatibility to Linux users.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Notice, however, that the 60 some tests that Wine leads on are synthetic through and through... and when you get to actual games it's XP all the way. While Wine's performance is impressive, the requisite dose of salt may be several kg for this article.
No, because you spent a week in the first place trying to get the damn thing built, then you wasted the rest of your life arguing with your "friends" about the beneficial effects of -fomit-frame-pointer during your shifts at the Dairy Queen.
Yes.
BIG yes.
How to put this: while there may not be a default gentoo install that includes X, let's say this. Gentoo with all of the frills still boots faster and performs faster than any Fedore Core install period.
I'm not pulling that out of my butt, either, that's from experience. Having both FC and Gentoo installed on identical hardware... gentoo will boot to X far faster than FC can get to a terminal. I have yet to find a distro that matches gentoo in speed, and I'm not saying "pmfg -O3!!three!!11!".
Look at the PC Mark tests (minus the silly graphics tests and the xp startup, app loading tests). Most of the tests are won by wine probably by only a few fractions of a second - half by less than a percentage point. Besides, they're mostly testing either memory management, which Linux generally does better, or CPU, which Wine has a huge advantage in because it's Gentoo and compiled specifically for the system.
Gentoo really does feel faster. Compare say a Debian system (which is compiled purely for stability) to a Gentoo system (which is compiled purely for speed) and the Gentoo system will win. However I still use Debian because I kind of like my stability!
Enough with the gentoo bashing! These compiler optimization options would not be a part of gcc if they did nothing.
I don't make fun of your hair do I?! So stop making fun of my favorite distro!
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
For my linux install, I'm using Ubuntu. I find it pretty slow for most thing (on a P4 2.6) but worse it's constantly swapping in and out of memory (512MB) even though all I do is surf and browse files in the GUI, would Gentoo provide a boost or is the benefit not worth the time invested?
From what I know about Gentoo, as a whole, yes. I run KDE on a 2.4 with 512MB of RAM and have effectively 0 swapping happening (until I fire up a massive Java app, or do like 80 things at once). Gentoo's speed isn't the "-fmad-compile-optimize-h4x", it's just how the OS itself is built and configured by default. I'd say give it a shot. (Though, in all honesty, -O3 actually does help to an extent, but that's another topic.)
...it makes you feel relaxed, slightly fogged and, in sufficient quantities, happily drunk. Windows, on the other hand, just makes you feel angry and frustrated. Give me wine!
oh, wait, you were discussing software?
Seems a bit strange to me to do a current comparison by using a version of 3d Mark that is 5 years old. If you were going to test out a 6800 on Windows alone you would use 2003 or 2005, the fact they didn't use that one in their Wine comparison suggests to me it couldn't run the later versions at all. The fact that 2000 ran better than under XP, but 2001 ran considerably worse suggests this as well.
If this is the case, the results in regard to game performance are out-dated at best.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
While I assume that the results are correct, they are also substantially meaningless. First, Windows does a lot of work to handle backwards compatibility and boundary cases. WINE often breaks when it encounters really old code or boundary cases. It's easy to be faster when you are doing less work. Second, the functionality may not be exactly equivalent, just close enough. For example, when you have memory copies, one implementation may choose to optimize for very small allocations and be hitting the OS for new zero filled pages for 4k and 8k copies, while the other trades off higher memory use for faster fulfillment of these larger memory requests. Different design choices also mean that different amounts of work are done. Choosing the superior implementation involves looking at more than a small handful of benchmarks.
...if the Slashdot editors aren't adding salt to it. (Salted wine? Yuk!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Anyone else notice the funny stuff going on with the statistics? All the statistics are reported as percentages of the XP value, with higher = better. That means that if wine is "+ 90%", it's performing less than twice as fast as XP. But if it's "- 90%", XP is performing ten times faster!
So whatever this is measuring (and I concur that it seems to be mostly Linux graphics drivers), it's not reporting the results particularly well.
Can someone explain to me why my package manager giving me the option of setting compiler optimizations for packages it builds pisses so many people off? I went Gentoo for the init scripts, anyways...
All's true that is mistrusted
Wine is significantly slower in nearly half of the tests. And getting faster results during memory and CPU tests don't make any sense. The OS shouldn't have anything to do with the results of these tests. Maybe the results are skewed by the Wine's timer implementations?
I am not sure that a grain of salt is needed; These numbers are much better that wine has known in the past, but they still are not particularly impressive.
Well, my experience with Wine/Cedega has been that for the games and applications that work, the disk-access tends to be faster. Not necessarily because the actual disk is being accessed faster, but because the filesystem (in my case reiserfs) is speedier to read.
The other wonderful thing I've found about Wine is the graphics abstraction layer. My laptop has a GeForce FX5600 (mobile) card in it. It's actually rather spiffy for most games still, but sucked ass at Battlefield 2 in windows, popping up the warning that my graphics drivers were out of date. Well, it seems that the drivers are tied to the laptop in windows to co-habitate with the power-saving etc etc... so I couldn't update from the official NVidia ones. And of course, my laptop vendor doesn't offer updates for anything over a year old it seems.
In linux, however, the normal NVidia accelerated driver works. The game runs on that faster than in windows, and with better detail levels. I don't know if it's just that the Cedega HAL does a better emulation for the software bits, or if it's due to the more-up-to-date driver, but it's a much less painful experience in Linux.
Lastly, my soundcard. SB Live 5.1. Abit dated, but with livedrive still a very nice functional card, except that the windows drivers will eventually/randomly freeze in most directX intensive games. Running in linux... no problemo. That's actually why I switched to Cedega/Debian almost completely (too many losses in Warcraft from lockups).
Sorry if I'm a bit sensitive about this, but Slashdot is the last place I expected to get a hard time about my hair.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The real question on everybody's mind is: how well does it run Counter-Strike 1.5? I didn't see that test on there.
The transition from Debian-based systems to Gentoo will be fairly painless. Just understand that it may be several days before you get a working system. My main computer is a dual-boot for WinXP and Gentoo. During the install, the family had to live without being able to access WinXP for almost 5 days. Of course, this was on a mid-range AthlonXP with 256MB RAM. I have (in boxes at the moment) a new dual-core Athlon. I expect it to take about 48 hours from fdisk to KDE.
There are precompiled packages avalible to speed things up, but where's the fun in that.
Yeah, Debian to Gentoo is quite easy. Just use "emerge" vice "apt-get".
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The Linux Kernel has some graphics support but neither the Kernel nor the X Window System are geared for fast 3D graphics. DirectX is good at getting around using the slower Windows GDI. DirectX is one of the few things Microsoft does somewhat well. (Insert joke here about Directx 9 and taking nine trys to get DirectX right.)
I have a feeling that unless some major changes are made to the X Window System (and maybe Linux drivers) that WINE will not catch up with WindowsXP and DirectX, but that just means I would need a faster computer.
WINE doesn't need to be the fastest. As long as it will run my older games (which Windows 2000 does not always do well) it may be more useful to me than an actual install of Windows.
---
This is just my opinion, please don't flame me just because you like Windows.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
I know this is repeat info for most people, but for the newbies...
There's actually an online application database where people have submitted their experiences/successes in getting Windows apps to run under Wine. If you want to see how well Office 2k3 works under Wine, this'd be the first place to look. Conversely, if you have success running a given Windows app, be sure to submit your experiences. Feedback to the App DB not only helps other Wine users, but is helpful feedback for Wine developers on outstanding compatibility issues.
The URL is: http://appdb.winehq.org/
Where are the comparissons for 3dmark2005?
Surely 2000 isnt supported. Wouldnt it be more fair to use a dos emulator? Fits in the same gnere
Okay, I *like* WINE. It's a great piece of software, and very useful. But it doesn't make Linux a drop-in Windows replacement. If you decide "Gee, I think I should use Linux as a desktop" (I do), then it's icing on the cake if WINE runs something. It's not reasonable to simply expect a given piece of software to run flawlessly under WINE, though.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Here you go: http://funroll-loops.org/. In short, it's not that emerge lets you specify options, it's all the cluebats screaming about how awesomely fast -O9 is.
- rustytaco
Nobody said they were doctored; the slashdot editor said "take it with a grain of salt". I see a lot of reasons to do so:
Honestly? The results probably aren't manipulated, but the presentation is very clearly set up with a number of tricks (perhaps without him/her realizing it) to give the impression that Wine "kicked some serious ass", when for the most part, it did horribly.
Please help metamoderate.
What's more impressive is that he managed to get 3DMark 2001 working at all under Wine!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They often do things under very specific conditions and are useless elsewhere. If you're not a compiler expert (which I definately am not), it's unlikely you'll have any apreciable performance gain. It's quite possible that you'll see a performance loss if things aren't done correctly. Even an expert may or may not get a gain.
I love Gentoo myself, but I'm not delusional about performance gains. I do it for the customizability it offers. For instance, last I checked, you could get a Debian package that contained the Perl bindings for Vim, or the Python bindings for Vim, but not both. With Gentoo, I can easily instruct Portage to build in both.
Not a typewriter
Presumably, the memory tests deal with the various OS-level Alloc's (HeapAlloc, GlobalAlloc, LocalAlloc, VirtualAlloc, etc...), which include fault protection checking, SACL checking, and other safety features. The reason that Wine performs better is that either they have implemented a faster version of the WinXX memory management APIs, or that the underlying Linux memory management is faster and the cost of the Wine wrapping calls is negligible. Same for the CPU-related tests... Just as memory is a managed resource in the WinAPI world, so is the CPU (also having SACLs/DACLs to check, and threading/fiber management, etc...)
Several days was when there was still stage1. Now that you must start at stage 3 (and later recompile if you like) you are done in 1 day. After you finish kernel, you just emerge x and kde and next morning you are ready to go (just after you configure x). About speed, it is faster that kubuntu (which I used), but it's the other things that made me go back to gentoo.
Whoops. That should read "overwhelming", not "overall".
Please help metamoderate.
*shrug* same site it was two years ago. Yes, Gentoo is swarming with clueless n00bies; I was a clueless n00bie once and so was everybody else. If it gives them something to play with, keeps their interests, and gets them learning about Linux, it's worth having to deal with "why doesn't -Os -f-unroll-loops work?" when I talk to one (and I try to help them, because plenty of people helped me back in the day -- that's the whole spirit of GNU, right?).
Seriously, what should n00bies do, then? Gentoo is a largely user-configured operating system with unbelievably simple and hand-holding documentations. Yes, #gentoo is always full of n00bs asking why they can't boot now that they disabled all block devices in their kernel. But then again, that means it's full of n00bs who have configured and compiled a kernel; other distros I've seen say "WARNING WARNING ELITE USERS ONLY" about that. Why? People point out (rightly) that you can install Gentoo and still be an ignoramus. However, if you're actually interested in learning, you can also learn from the installation procedure the commands for fdisk, the options to hdparm, how chroot works, what /etc/resolv.conf is, blah, blah, blah.
funroll-loops is half-right. Gentoo is not simply a ricer distribution; it's a hobbyist distribution. It's the kit-car of distros. There are plenty of people who are doing the software equivalent of bolting a huge spoiler on their Civic. But there are plenty of us who are just having fun. And, anyways, the point of free software is that we're free to do what we want with it, even if that means being a moronic jackass.
All's true that is mistrusted
sigs outside the sig field should lead to an automatic downmod
I know what you mean about "other things". I love never having to deal with RMP hell agian.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I've gotta say, I was exteremly impressed when I tried my first taste of real wine. Blender3D ran better in Wine then it did on Windows.
As a longtime transgaming subscriber, I can tell you that wine really does work as well as pictured. However, it uses an absolutely offensive amount of ram while it does so. I don't knwo how closely related the branches are though.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
It does not take a second look to figure out the stats made up.
1. Most of Wine's wins are in the 0-2% mark. Means nothing except _inconclusive_; otherwise where is the variance, num tests to justify this?
2. Wine's perf is bad in the tests it lost
3. Old test suites were used
4. As some one said, If Wine is 90% faster it means it is 90% faster. If it is 90% slower it means it is 10 times slower!!!
BUT, what is really impressive is that Wine actually managed to run all the tests. The compatibility is indeed impressive. This benchmark would have been very credible had it not played with the numbers and colors.
Maybe a troll, but here is my argument against Wine:
Windows is moving to WinFX. Then it makes more sense to emulate WinFX's API than Win32 API. (WinFX does use Win32 extensively underneath, but why emulate 2 API's??). In the longer term, the answer to Windows compatibility is not Wine, it is MONO.
In my experience, it's not the -funroll-my-toilet-paper type of options. It's more the general lack of bloat in Gentoo that makes it faster.
I used Fedora, Debian, and others for many years, having resisted Gentoo due to time constraints (I had better things to do than compile an entire distro), but then one day I had some free time and tried it.
The lack of RedHack's Gnome customizations was enough for me to be converted. It's *amazing* how much faster Gnome runs without all the useless RedHat garbage cluttering up memory and chewing CPU cycles here and there.
On the other hand, you really have to know what you're doing to set up Gnome properly with everything working "as advertised."
Now I use it on servers at work because it's actually configurable enough to handle our rather unique environment without rewriting half the init scripts.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
Or it could be that WINE have implemented HeapAlloc etc as just plain old malloc without any ACL checking at all.
There are a number of reasons that might be the case, such as the way bootscripts are done and what types of services are started. My desktop machine is an Athlon XP 2100+ with a gig of RAM running Gentoo and it boots to a command prompt significantly slower than my laptop, which is a P3 700, 192MB RAM, running FreeBSD.
Obviously the laptop has a much simpler hardware config, less services that it needs to run, and because I reboot it fairly often I actually bothered to clean out the rc files. In Gentoo at least I know that I want all those things started. With FC you might be probing parts of the hardware config that you have hard-configured into Gentoo, or starting sendmail, more hefty logging facilities, automounters or whatever. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if FreeBSD's bootscripts are lighter-weight than Gentoo's in general.
I'm not discounting the booting speed advantage of Gentoo over, say, FC or Ubuntu. But take that Gentoo machine and make it run everything that FC runs on startup, and I bet a lot of the advantage goes away. Boot speed won't really tell you much about how the system will perform other tasks (as you can imagine, other than booting my laptop is much, much slower than my desktop).
what drivers where used? and what driver and OS configurations where used? and what about features? since a product has less features, it should have less to process, hence it running faster. how fast can windows 95 paint a window to the screen compared to windows xp? ya, i know, its a lame example, but its true.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All the gamers I know play 1 game all year, which is cool and all but over the time they spend 1500 bucks on motherboard, cpu, ram, video card, power supply, and all the other stuff... get like 30 more fps over acceptable ... super pro delux internet feeds and /still/ bitch about lag. I doubt they would be very interested in Wine. OTOH, I just play to keep in touch and so I can still be involved in their conversations and get their old (bad assed) video cards and stuff.
The tests are ok. Sure we need more (like later versions of software, assuming that it runs of course), but at least it's a start. I look at all the green's as a "these bits work ok" and anything worse than yellow as "this needs a lot of work". Beyond that, I wouldn't read anything else into it.
We also need to know what version of the NVidia driver was used, on XP and on Linux, as this will make a huge difference. It'd also be good to know some other stuff about each setup (eg: DirectX version and patch level under XP, kernel version under Linux), etc.
As for these older tests not being significant: Bullcrap! So many games use bits of DirectX and the like that have been in there since well before 2000. While the tests are not the be-all and end-all, they are the building blocks that need to be completed before we jump headlong into the next level. Lets not get ahead of ourselves.
I mailed the guy with a few criticisms and ideas, so maybe we'll see some more info shortly. Note that I did this politely - people tend to listen to polite suggestions, as compared to knee-jerk style frustrated yelling and bitching.
The latest LugRadio show ( http://lugradio.org/episodes/43 ) features a very interesting interview of Jeremy White about Wine.
These results aren't presented to try to make Wine look better, nor is the author, consciously or unconsciously, trying to make it appear faster. These results simply were not meant to be used to say that Wine is better than Windows, and only Slashdot would try to make it appear that way. The real point of these comparisons, as is apparent if you read the Wine weekly summaries, is to give the Wine developers an idea of what areas need to be improved, and what areas are adequate. Green obviously means "at least as fast as Windows", which means that it's good. There is no point in grouping them any other way, since they don't care if they are 50% better or 1% better. Also, your criticisms of why this benchmark doesn't give a good idea of the relative speeds of Wine and Windows are quite wide of the mark (though they are valid complaints). The real reason why this benchmark cannot be used to gauge relative speeds is that it doesn't cover real world work loads. They measure a very small number of very specific things, mostly related to gaming and 3D performance. The benchmarks they ran that weren't related to that were designed to test the *hardware* speed, not the speed of the API. The Wine developers know this, and that's what the comment about taking it with a grain of salt means. It's probably adequate to give a rough idea of what parts of Wine need to be improved, but it is nowhere close to a comprehensive comparison of the speed of Windows and Wine, and was never meant as such.
Nah, they missed the most important test.
Does it run Flight Simulator 1.0?
Yes. Vendor-lock-in is what Microsoft generally does well.
-- Imperial units must die --
Looking at the results - "Grammer Check"
Shame it was not "Spelling Check" but on still quite amusing.
In all seriousness, interesting and makes me want to revist Wine as it looks a lot better than when I last tried it (given I run pretty low spec hardware, performance is key rather than stability).
Though I do think "Wine or XP aborted on 18 tests" was a bit cheeky as it was 3 XP aborts, 15 Wine aborts...
From what I know about Gentoo, as a whole, yes. I run KDE on a 2.4 with 512MB of RAM and have effectively 0 swapping happening (until I fire up a massive Java app, or do like 80 things at once). Gentoo's speed isn't the "-fmad-compile-optimize-h4x", it's just how the OS itself is built and configured by default
Um, the question was whether he'd see a marked improvement changing from debian/ubuntu -- and given that Debian uses the same kernel as gentoo, and the same apps, it's very unlikely that there will be any difference in performance unless it comes from the "-fmad-compile" options. [In my experience, the -fmad-compile won't make any difference in practice either unless you're talking about very specialized balls-to-the-wall code like scientific computing or whatever.]
The "0 swapping happening" is an attribute of the linux kernel, not the distro; I notice the same thing under debian (in fact I generally see no disk i/o at all unless I'm writing files, because of linux's excellent disk caching). If the OP is having problems with swapping it means that he doesn't have enough memory for the apps he's using; a distro change is unlikely to help with that.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Is there any way to make Windows apps run on PPC or SPARC hardware, possibly using Wine in conjuction with something else? I like the idea of Wine, but I have no x86 stuff in my room. Not even sure if I'd have a use for it, but it would be fun to play with.
Follow me
Well, I don't understand why people here are talking about direct x, 3dmark or games. Yeah, I agree that games are fun (and maybe easier to get figures like fps or something), but for me (and I think many others and especially companies) they are not the reason to delay my transition from windows to linux. I think different productivity and office programs are the real reason that someone might not do the transition. If they work well, then people start concidering switch. And most of them are starting to work really well, even install very easily (with latest wine versions).
I have dual boot machine, linux and windows. I play around with linux and have it as testing environment for my web server, but everything else I do in Windows. When my Adobe CS2 starts working in Wine as well as in Windows (also my wacom pen tablet, last time I tried pressure and tilt didn't work), then I don't have any reason to work in Windows anymore. My computer would still be dual boot for the few games I play, but I wouldn't need to boot to Windows to work.
And I think it is similar situation for many companies too. There's some program or some feature of a program that doesn't work in linux (and maybe in wine) too well. Transitioning from program to something else might be a real pain (for example starting to learn gimp, I would have to do that on my own time, my employer wouldn't pay me to learn it, sacraficing my own free time is not an option... even if gimp would do everything I want it to do) for many reasons including those I told.
I hope some day linux with wine is viable option for me to do transition from windows to linux. It's not now, but maybe in few years.
Well, now we have salt with wine too.
WINE implements the FUNCTIONALITY of the Windows API. It merely provides the same API.
The implementation is by no means 'published' and therein lies the reverse engineering.
Reverse engineering does not necessarily mean disassembly or anything remotely dark-hattish.
It doesn't seem to me the benchmarks give wildly different results - it seems that exactly the benchmarks requiring lots of memory where running slower. I would expect wine to consistently do well if one were to run it on a machine with twice the RAM of a similar windows machine.
What I find missing in the benchmarks are "boring" benchmarks for other tasks but graphics.
LACK OF BLOAT IN GENTOO!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!1?1111
Nearly all of the software that ships with gentoo is bloated. For example, gentoo's interpretation of cp includes an option to draw a progress bar while the file copies! That's not in the GNU codebase, that's something gentoo added. Bloat that gentoo added.
My other car is first.
Pinch of salt indeed
Coral Link... site's a little slow (Score:-1, Redundant)
Well, at least now you don't have to worry about being a karma whore.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
... the detailed reproduction of another manufacturers product following detailed study of it's function and composition.
.NET architecture would be another example of somebody coming up with an alternative implementation without it being reverse engineering. The components of Mono may actually work more efficiently or also much less efficiently than their .NET counterparts but they behave the same and have an identical interface but very different internals.
That sentence came from the Oxford American Dictionary. To me that sounds as if reverse engineering has more to do with cloning products than just coming up with an alternative implementation which is what Wine is. All that Wine does is create a blackbox that works like the Windows API from the point of view of a Windows application but using totally different internals. Reverse engineering would be if they had recreated the internals more or less exactly using components replicated as far as possible from the originals in which case they would have to recreate the Windows source code from binaries somehow. You could also point to the AMD processors that implement the x86 instruction set, internally they are radically different from the Intel originals but to Windows they function the same. If that was reverse engineering I somehow suspect AMD would have gotten it's pants sued of by now. Instead Intel has now adopted the AMD64 instruction set that AMD came up with which is basically just x86 extended to 64 bit. The 'Mono' implementation of the Microsoft
You did raise an interesting point about limited reverse engineering which is probably true. In order to clear up inconsistencies and undocumented features in the Windows API the Wine team probably did some analysis of Windows. Surprisingly enough I recenty found out that this is actually permissable under copyright laws, at least in my own country, if the manufacturer is reluctant to issue full and comprehensive documentation and it is vital to the success of your project and you are not attempting to replicate the internals of the undocumented product just determine how it works to fill in patchy documentation which is the case with Microsoft and the Wine team in this case, they are not making a bolt for bolt replica of Windows. From what I can tell Wine is not doing anything illegal or unethical if they were producing line for line copies of Windows system binaries by reverse engineering Windows source code that would be another matter.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
the only thing that windows does better than linux is compatibility (and that's even debateable) is user-friendliness. For instance Unix will let you modify a core file that will make your computer reboot as soon as it starts up. So wine still has far to go, but it has come very far.
5 Days!!! don't do a stage 1. absolutely nothing to gain from it. especially since gcc-3.4 is stable now. but it's not on the livecd's yet. you'll probably end up recompiling the entire system anyway. it may also be a good idea to do a grp install. just to get a faster working system. you can alway's re-emerge them later. I have an athlon-xp 2200+ and although it might take 4 days to get the system to where it is now. It take less than 8 hour's for an install and a functional system. infact I think I get to reboot in 2-3 hours.
cp is a lightweight utility to begin with. Those kinds of features don't detract significantly from performance.
On the larger components such as Gnome, things suffer from considerably less featuritis than in any other distribution I've laid eyes on.
BTW, if you don't want the progress bar, you can always disable the Gentoo-specific patches... I don't recall exactly how to enable it offhand, but there *is* a "build from original, unpatches sources" option.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
The only single package I've had take more than 24 hours(on a 900MHz Duron system--we're not talking 486s here) was OpenOffice.org. And it provides a bin package for that reason--and it's still quite slow, packages for OpenOffice take a long time to install no matter what type they are. And the thing I like about Gentoo is that, for example, I don't need to have that annoying gtkspell thing emerged if I'm not going to use it with Gaim. A friend of mine commented on #linuxattack that a Gentoo system often takes less time to install and get going than a SuSE system because the Gentoo system doesn't have to install near as many packages, even though each individual package takes longer.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
is that there IS NO complete API for win32. There are bugs, undocumented features and outright porkie-pies.
Damn those grubby users for not keeping their fingers off of my /etc/inittab and constantly fiddling with the default runlevel entry!
On an urelated note, could you pass me a toke of whatever you are smoking?
That could be true, too. I suppose it would make implementing a number of the WinAPIs easier, not to mention faster. :)
I haven't looked at the Wine source (and probably can't), and didn't mean to imply one way or another the correctness of the Wine implementation of the mentioned APIs... I have some familiarity with Win32 underpinnings, and had only intended on commenting on the validity of the tests (memory/CPU) themselves as having a quantifiable performance component, as there is actually measurable work being done in Windows for those related APIs.
These kind of tests only breing discredit to the 'linux' community and should be ignored, I believe enough was already said about the statistical nonsense this test is . but i had to express my anger here. WARNING : The amount of salt needed in this analisys will make your blood pressure raise to the 100's
If the OP is having problems with swapping it means that he doesn't have enough memory for the apps he's using; a distro change is unlikely to help with that.
Not necessarily, the big plus of gentoo is the small number of extra services which get installed. Also you can control which features a program will use. OpenOffice for example will probably be compiled with Gnome and KDE support for distros like ubuntu. If you don't use KDE you can just drop KDE support with gentoo. => smaller binaries, less unneeded libs, more ram left, less swapping.
Move Sig. For great justice.
Tell me when I can play more than Quake 3 on a flavor of Linux.
I agree with you. When I was a kid we had 8 bit computers and you learned by doing. In those days you of fritzing your hardware by moving it too suddenly, causing a machine lockup with crappy code was the least of your problems.
Gentoo evokes that era for me, and you can't have a go at people for breaking something when they're busy learning. So what if they over-optimise compiler flags and break things? When they fix them up they're learning a valuable lesson, and that lesson isn't 'next time use a binary distro'
Anyway, today's school-age gentoo n00bs are tomorrow's crop of system admins.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
How many applications actually work??? I'm going to hazzard a guess that Windows will run around the 100% mark, wine a paltry 25%
My tech blog
Call me a novice but the title of this thread made me wonder what benchmark could be associated between Windows and my favourite Cab Sav! - Matt Out
Being a long time Slackware user and only have a way ever-so-often need to run something on Windors "I ask why use WINE?" I have a Windors box that is a slave to my Slackbox with Synergy. It asnswers the telephone until I need something. I guess I look at it like this. If you go to the trouble to install Linux or a Unix flavor only to install WINE and run Windors apps on it "Why even bother?" Just run Windors... I started running Slackware to get away from the trouble not add to it. IMO
Strange that you have these problems. I run Ubuntu 5.10 on a 800MHz PIII with 512 MB RAM with FireFox, Thunderbird, Azureus, Gaim, Abiword, 2 nautilus windows, and some terminals open and my memory usage is 293 MB RAM and 12 MB swap. The speed of the desktop is comparable to an XP box in the 2+ GHz range. It sounds like you have a memory leakage problem. You shouldn't swap much unless you are editing huge files or running very large programs.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
So no... Wine was only made for x86 machines.
Personally, I would sacrifice performance for functionality any day. More times than not, I am not running the Windows app in any manor that requires critical performance (and if you are, you really need your head examined!).
yay! i have a future!
It's always been my experience when using wine that wine performs better than Windows. Except of course for when wine doesn't work. So when it works, it works better, but it doesn't work nearly often enough. Notepad works though. Once you use notepad in wine you'll never go back.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
On a reasonably modern system Gentoo takes 1, maybe 2 days at most to set up, and that's stage 1. Stage 3 takes an afternoon at most and is every bit as good unless you have some very odd requirements.
James P. Barrett
But when it doesnt run the application you need, does speed matter? The application database is much more useful first.
( not faulting the WINE guys here, its is a huge task they have undertaken and are doing well )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Manage windows boxes from Linux through Wine.
This just in: Both OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox are now available for Linux
In other news, I'm not a troll but parent's point is 2/3rds incorrect.
I'm a gentoo user and I disagree. Gentoo does in general take longer to set up be in a working state than most OS. It's not supposed to be easy-installing like ubuntu. But I switched back from ubuntu because of the advantages that portage have over apt-get. Now my KDE runs faster and I don't have to keep two types of package on my system: 386 and 686.
I wish I had a "+1 LOL Gotcha!" mod for everyone else who replied to you.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
the requisite dose of salt
Enough with the cliches, especially that one. Try an analogy. Let's see. "Be as skeptical as reading G.W. Bush's interpretation of Superstring Theory" Doesn't quite roll off the tongue but you get the point.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
less unneeded libs
Rush Limbaugh uses Gentoo?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If the KDE support is never used, it will never get paged into RAM. Thus, RAM usage will be largely the same.
Has anyone tried to get WINE to work on a new intel Macbook or Imac? Now that a processor emulation is no longer needed, will it be a simple recompile, or are there other hurdles to jump before I can run windows software on my mac?
... I just have a bunch of educational software my course gives me that I would like to run, but it does not have a mac version... That and the ocassional game would be nice (I know macs have games, but I have a seriouse backlog of classics I loved from my windows/DOS days)
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
No, but I'll bash your hair if it's necessary. I asked a serious question -- does it matter?
"Gentoo is my favorite distro, I like it." is valid. I like Ubuntu. That's why we have choice.
"Gentoo is built for speed." is not valid, as I haven't seen a benchmark yet that warrants five days to get a usable system.
- oZ
// i am here.
in 2.6 kernel's there's a setting somewhere in /proc (cant remember the exact path, i'm on a window box at the mo) called swappyness.
Its possible that debian has their swappyness set higher than the other distro (gentoo i think, i didn't rta)
Because the only thing that Linux can't do that Windows can is run my son's kiddie video games. Wine has become very stable and adept at that in the last year. Yeah! Soon I will blow away that infested piece of crap. Windows, you're fired!
Nah, I play mostly with my Plan9 system for doing stuff.
But I use Linux to browse the web with at least 10 tabs open at a time (probably more), using the filebrowser to look stuff up (Nautilus is a resource hog), and perhaps a FTP client to upload files. That's it of programs of note (the others are accesory programs like calculator or Sasuga (?), japanese spelling program - things that aren't processor/resource intensive).
Sometimes I fire up emacs. But the swapping always happens when I'm only browsing the web or my files. Then I sit there for a minute waiting for it to subside.
I like Ubuntu overall (it has great detection and I was impressed how easy it's to burn CDs right out of the box, so to speak) but I always run into strange problems. Since using Automatix, I get repository errors when trying to upgrade my programs - these errors happened eventually on every release I tried. Perhaps my computer is just jinxed:)
Anyway, Gentoo was one distro I haven't tried yet. I tried Linux From Scratch years ago, but I'm too busy for that now.
If you are going to do a stage 3 or a GRP, you might as well use Debian. Deb has packages for GCC and the kernel compiled for virtually every acrhetecture out there.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Debian, last time I checked, installs a ton of redundant stuff, which is why God invented dpkg -r... Just because extra services get installed doesn't mean they need to stay =)
A bit bad example. At least in Debian, GNOME support is in a separate packages (openoffice.org-gnome, ooqstart-gnome, openoffice.org-evolution). I don't think OpenOffice.org even has KDE support, apart of the generic freedesktop standards support, which we hold self-evident these days.
The tests I'm referring to are the read/write memory tests. They're over small amounts of memory within a page so the memory manager would have nothing to do with it. Not only that, if allocations are included in the test time, well, that's one inefficent test since it's ment to test hardware not OS overhead.
When I see comments like "And so we have this huge cyclical myth propogating that for instance 'X sucks'." I wonder if some of you ever even read my origonal post.
The X Window system does not "suck" nor did I say it does. I however did say that WINE does NOT need to be the fastest. The X Window System works well for almost anything you can throw at it and can even be set up so that the actual program you are running is on a different computer and the one you are using just dislays what is going on. It was designed to be very useful, but not to be the best gaming engine on the face of the earth.
Many of you seem to be missing the point which is The X Window system is fast enough and the effort to make it faster isn't worth it.
And what is with that Anonymous Coward commment "DirectX dont access hardware through GDI, that would be sluggish. DX access directly to hardware by a driver implemented HAL."
I said "DirectX is good at getting around [MEANING NOT USING] using the slower Windows GDI." Are enough of you dumb enough to actually be confused by the phrase "getting around?" Yes, I now realize that was a poorly constructed sentence with two meanings and that is my fault, but that is no excuse. By the context you really should have figured out what I ment or at least asked what I ment but instead a bunch of you (but not all of you) acted like dumbasses and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Yes, DirectX can use HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and if a spicific feature is not available it can sometimes use HEL (hardware emulation layer.) (And there is also the Reference Rasterizer. Unlike HEL, the reference rasterizer supports every Direct3D feature according to the DirectX 7.0 Programmer's Reference.)
Microsoft put a lot of time and effort into optimizing DirectX for speed. If you want to squeeze some more performance out of WINE you will most likely need to have the people working on the Kernel driver, the X Window System, and WINE working tward the goal of optimizing for speed. But why would they do that? As I said before "WINE doesn't need to be the fastest."
Please don't be upset by anything I have said. We are all dumbasses sometimes I forgive you.
---
Summary 1: WINE does not need to have the best benchmarks( be the fastest.)
Summary 2: I know that many of you deal with dumbasses on Slashdot way too often and are fed up with it, but please realize that sometimes you are the dumbass.
Summary 3: The phrase "getting around" can be taken two ways. My bad! Sorry!
Summary 4: Because we are all dumbasses sometimes, I forgive you.
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This is just my opinion, please don't flame me just because you didn't take the time to not be a dumbass.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.