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Porting Wine to FreeBSD
Wine is an open source implementation of a Windows application environment, which allows running Windows programs on other operating systems.
It is a complex piece of software, that relies on various parts of the underlying operating system. This page is meant to collect various bits of information about Wine on FreeBSD to assist in porting.
Status
On FreeBSD/i386 8.0 and later Wine should work for most user applications including Microsoft Office 2007. Games tend to be more problematic, but many work without issue. See the AppDB at WineHQ for the status of application support.
Support for Wine/i386 on FreeBSD/amd64 is available in the emulators/i386-wine-devel port with unofficial packages provided by dbn@.
If you run into bugs, feel free to file a bug report in the Wine bugzilla and mention the version of FreeBSD you are using.
Binary Image Activation
The FreeBSD kernel can be configured to detect a Microsoft Windows binary and to automatically launch Wine to run the Windows binary. This allows one to treat Windows binaries like normal binaries (i.e. no need to call wine foo.exe).
As root do:
# binmiscctl add wine --interpreter /usr/local/bin/wine \
--magic "\x4d\x5a\x90\x00\x03\x00\x00\x00\x04\x00\x00\x00\xff\xff\x00\x00\xb8\x00\x00\x00" \
--mask "\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff" \
--size 20 --set-enabled
32bit Wine on FreeBSD/amd64
For details please see the i386-Wine wiki page.
Open Tasks
- add kqueue(?) support to server/change.c
- port missing bits in dlls/ntdll/cdrom.c
- copy protection support (securom, safedisc, etc.)
- DOS support - partially supported through DOSBox if installed
- improve CPU feature detection (MMX,SSE,…) in dlls/ntdll/nt.c:fill_cpu_info()
More Wine Bug Reports
Known Problems
Address space organisation
The address space of a wine process under FreeBSD/i386 looks roughly like this:
0x00000000-0x00110000 | DOS area |
0x00110000-0x60000000 | available for Windows exe, DLLs, thread stacks, heaps,… |
0x60000000-0x6000???? | wine executable |
0x6000????-0x6200???? | about 32MiB libc malloc(3) heap (since FreeBSD 7.0 malloc(3) can use mmap(2) as well) |
0x6200????-0x7ffe0000 | unreserved, available to load libs (libc.so, libm.so, libX11.so,…), Wine DLLs (ntdll.dll.so, kernel32.dll.so,…) and other mmap(2) calls in code outside Wine (e.g. graphics drivers) |
0x7ffe0000-0x82000000 | reserved by wine |
0x82000000-0xbe?????? | unreserved, available to load more libs, Wine DLLs and other mmap(2) calls in code outside Wine (e.g. graphics drivers) |
0xbe??????-0xc0000000 | main wine process stack |
0xc0000000-0xffffffff | FreeBSD kernel address space |
This seems to mostly work, but the problem is that it's possible for Wine DLLs to be loaded beyond 0x80000000, which (by default) isn't user address space anymore on Windows and this could confuse some programs. On Linux this problem doesn't exist because Wine reserves everything beyond 0x80000000 and mmap allocations go downwards in memory. On Linux mmap can allocate space below 0x60000000 when needed. On FreeBSD addresses above 0x80000000 are not reserved, because mmap allocations go upwards starting after the malloc heap and there would only be about 480MiB available otherwise which is not always sufficient.
Copy protection schemes
At this point the main reason copy protection schemes like Securom and Safedisc don't work is that ntdll.dll.so and kernel32.dll.so aren't loaded at the right address. On Linux these libs have a specific base address (0x7bc00000 and 0x7b800000 respectively), but the FreeBSD ELF loader doesn't support base addresses for libs (only for programs).
Race in ptrace(2)
(This has been fixed in FreeBSD 8.1.)
There's a race in the FreeBSD ptrace(2) implementation that causes Wine to hang sometimes. A typical example is winedbg hanging. This also causes a test failure in dlls/kernel32/tests/toolhelp.c.
More info: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-August/021430.html
Mailing Lists
You can use one of the following mailing lists:
- freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org: Wine topics specifically related to FreeBSD.
- wine-devel@winehq.org: General Wine developers mailing list.
- wine-users@winehq.org: General Wine users mailing list.