On Friday 01 September 2006 03:52, Jeremy White wrote:

Dan Kegel wrote:

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On 8/30/06, Mark Smith [email protected] wrote:

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I have a windows dll and header files. I want to make a library that I can link to and use on linux. What are the steps required to do this?

Sorry, you can't. Not at the moment, anyway. That's on the to-do list.

It's not that black and white, is it?

I believe you can, and it actually works reasonably well. BUT there's a big catch - you have to make your program into a Winelib application.

Actually there's probably an easier way - a scheme I've been considering is one involving a crt0.o designed to load Wine (essentially making the native executable an equivalent of wine-pthread with other stuff), then start a Winelib program whose entry point calls back into a second entry point in the original executable. This scheme ought to work without any modifications to the core of Wine. We also wouldn't need to be reserving any memory areas, so the trimmed down operating system entry point of the Wine executable might be something like this:

int __wine_startup( int argc, char **argv, char **envp) { char error[1024]; char winelib_argv[3]; char wine_entry_addr[sizeof(void *) * 2 + 1];

__wine_argc = argc; __wine_argv = argv; __wine_envp = envp;

wine_pthread_set_functions( &pthread_functions, sizeof(pthread_functions) );

sprintf(wine_entry_addr, "%p", __wine_entry); winelib_argv[0] = "execallback.exe.so"; winelib_argv[1] 0;

wine_init( 2, winelib_argv, error, sizeof(error) ); fprintf( stderr, "wine: failed to initialize: %s\n", error ); exit(1); }

A routine "__wine_exe_entry_point" would be exported by the executable. The startup code for "excallback.exe.so" would call that routine as substantially all of its initialisation code, so that the executable calls wine_dll_register providing its own details.

I suspect the "difficulty" associated with having a Linux executable that calls Windows DLLs using Wine has been due the assumption that "main()" in the executable would be executed before Wine - by throwing out this assumption the problem may be a whole lot easier to solve.