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

Since FreeBSD/i386 7.0 and FreeBSD/amd64 8.0, Wine should work for most user applications. Games tend to be more problematic, but it's worth trying.

If you run into bugs, feel free to file a bug report in the Wine bugzilla and mention the version of FreeBSD you're using.

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

Sound support

Volume is often set to zero. If that happens to you, run winecfg, and at the bottom of the sound tab, set hardware acceleration to emulation instead of full.

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

Wine on FreeBSD/amd64

Wine requires LDT support, but it is not available on RELENG_7 and earlier versions. This is fixed in 8.0, r190620.

FreeBSD currently lacks support for 32bit ports on a 64bit system. However, with a little bit of effort you can build and use the 32 bit wine executable on an amd64 system (Diablo 2 works just fine). The following list is not minimal, as I tried several different paths before I got one working.

# cd /usr/src && make buildworld installworld distribution TARGET=i386 DESTDIR=/compat/i386
# chroot /compat/i386
# /etc/rc.d/ldconfig start
# mount -t devfs devfs /dev
# mkdir -p /usr/ports; mount nfs:/usr/ports /usr/ports  (or mount it via nullfs from outside the chroot, or just copy everything over)

set the environment

# setenv MACHINE i386
# setenv UNAME_p i386
# setenv UNAME_m i386

# cd /usr/ports/emulators/wine && make install clean
# exit

Use something like the following aliases

alias winecfg="LD_32_LIBRARY_PATH=/compat/i386/usr/local/lib PATH=/compat/i386/usr/local/bin:$PATH /compat/i386/usr/local/bin/winecfg"
alias wine32="LD_32_LIBRARY_PATH=/compat/i386/usr/local/lib PATH=/compat/i386/usr/local/bin:$PATH /compat/i386/usr/local/bin/wine"

For sound in Diablo 2 to work, run winecfg and set DirectSound acceleration to "Emulation" (see Known Problems section above) then run "wine32 Game.exe"

3D acceleration is working with the 64bit nvidia driver provided that you install the 32bit version (same version number) into the chroot (tested with World of Warcraft, 8.0-RELEASE).

Temporary and only until a better solution can be found with regards to building the port, an unmaintained AMD64 build of WINE can be downloaded from here: http://people.freebsd.org/~ivoras/wine/ . These builds were done with a continuation of the work posted here: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.devel.emulation/7596

Alternatively, there is a third way described here: http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=4708

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.