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Native Windows PE File Loading on OS X?

Posted by Zonk on from the to-what-purpose-and-determination dept.

ozmanjusri writes "Coders working on Wine for Mac have found that the Mac loader has gained its own undocumented ability to load and understand Windows Portable Executable (PE) files. They found PE loading capabilities in Leopard that weren't there in Tiger. Further dissection showed that Apple is masking references to 'Win' and 'PE' in the dll, which means it's not an accidental inclusion. Is Apple planning native PE execution within OS X?"

3 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. security? by yakumo.unr · · Score: 0, Redundant

    unless their access is locked down won't this open them up to a lot of new security vulnerabilities?

    like Quicktime seems to be the source of most win32 vulnerabilities at the moment ;p

  2. Virus??? by ocirs · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Doesn't that mean viruses and adware will also be able to run on Macs?

  3. No by acvh · · Score: 0, Redundant

    There is no reason for Apple to want to be able to run Windows executables natively. As others have pointed out, malware alone would be enough reason to say no.

    More likely this is related to EFI. Less likely this is something that a developer was playing around with and forgot to delete from his code before checking it in.