gex/wine

wine

Wine for gex. Wine's own Unix side is built as wasm32 with gex's compilers: the loader, ntdll's Unix half, the wineserver and the drivers. On the Windows side, Wine's builtin DLLs are native wasm modules; WoW64's i386 ones are still translated until their native builds pass. A program's own x86 code is translated by gex like any other guest code. Everything is built from the pins in wine64.pins (Wine and musl) and wine32.pins (the Unix libraries).

Build it

$ make wine
...
WINE64_DIST=~/.cache/gex/wine64/dist64-...
WINE64_PREFIX=~/.cache/gex/wine64/pfs64-...
WINE64_NATIVE=...

This is 64-bit Wine with WoW64. One process runs x86-64 and i386 Windows programs, and one prefix holds both (system32 and syswow64). make wine-x64 builds it without WoW64. The output lines are also saved in out/wine.env (or out/wine-x64.env), ready for .. Each step is cached in ~/.cache/gex/wine64 by what it is built from, so a rerun only checks. The first build takes about 40 minutes on 16 threads.

What it fetches and builds, in order:

• 64-bit Wine at WINE64_COMMIT. WINE_DIR= builds a Wine worktree of your own instead.
• The LP64 sysroot, from musl at MUSL64_COMMIT (make sysroot64).
• A configured 32-bit Wine build tree, which the wineserver is linked from (make -C wine build).
• Wine's tools, natively, and its PE side with MinGW.
• The Unix side as wasm. The native PE modules are linked as one core plus a module for each remaining DLL.
• The prefix (wineboot -i, natively, as user gex), with the session in session.reg applied.

It needs the host's MinGW-w64 GCC 12: x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc, plus i686-w64-mingw32-gcc for WoW64. It is a documented prerequisite, not a pin; another GCC version builds different PE files.

Run a program

$ . out/wine.env
$ wine/run.sh --page TREE --dist $WINE64_DIST --prefix $WINE64_PREFIX app.exe

That runs app.exe in the page on a bench box (BENCH_SH; run.sh -h). A 32-bit program runs in the 64-bit process through WoW64.

Known gaps

The 64-bit install has no:

• GStreamer: winegstreamer is left out (WINE_GSTREAMER=1 keeps it, but it cannot start), so media that Wine decodes through GStreamer does not play.
• Gecko: wine-gecko, the engine behind mshtml, is not shipped. Pages run with mshtml= in WINEDLLOVERRIDES, and HTML views (mshtml, the WebBrowser control, hh.exe) do not render.
• Mono: wine-mono is not shipped, and pages run with mscoree=, so .NET Framework programs do not start.

Legacy: 32-bit Wine

make wine32 (this directory's Makefile, wine32.pins' Wine commit) builds the older 32-bit-only Wine. Its PE side is staged from the host's Wine 11.15 (wine/legacy32/nt-stage-wine.sh). It stays only until WoW64 replaces it, and no new work goes into it. wine/run.sh app.exe runs a program on it natively, and the Makefile header lists its settings.