From: gt8134b@prism.gatech.EDU (Howlin' Bob) Subject: Re: dosemu and windows Date: 3 Jun 1993 01:23:52 GMT
In <1ujgki$82c@agate.berkeley.edu> garrett@sba70.berkeley.edu (Garrett D'Amore) writes:
>It occurs to me that Windows 3.x may be a bad thing to emulate.
>This is because Windows 3.1 runs on only ONE architecture, the
>80x86 -- which means that Windows programmers can get away with
>the same nonsense that DOS programmers do -- accessing the hardware
>and low-level interfaces directly! A better (???) way of adding
They're not supposed to under Windows. I doubt that dirty tricks
of *this* nature will be a major problem.
>Windows functionality to Linux may be (better sit down for this one!)
>to emulate NT! The reason is that since NT will run on many different
>architectures, programs written for it will *need* to be "well-
>behaved", otherwise they won't port! I would propose that if we
>can arrange to get a set of the libraries (official) for NT, then
>we could write an emulator that could map the calls to Linux/X11
>calls. I also suspect that because NT is more POSIX compliant than
>Win3.x, it will be easier to emulate in Linux.
Well, I won't say how hard I think it would be, because everyone seems
bent on ignoring any words to that effect about Windows. However,
I will tell you what I feel are some major obstacles :
1) NT is exactly not POSIX compliant. NT is Microsoft's own mutant
creation. There is a POSIX subsystem *within* NT, but it's very
limited and unusable for all normal NT programs.
2) NT has even more external cruft than Windows 3.1 to emulate.
3) NT is much much larger then Win3.1.
4) At the moment, 99% of all Windows programs are for Win3.1. NT runs
then under its Win16 subsystem, which we would have to implement
ourselves. So, we're back to writing Windows 3.1 again, but with
the addition of a 25MB program loader (no joke, people have reported
the *bootup* sequence eating 25MB in the April Beta, not to mention the
extra memory the Win16 subsystem takes up, and also not to mention
the 4MB every DOS session takes up).
I'm afraid this isn't really an option. Now, everyone can tell me how
easy it should be, if only...
--
Robert Sanders
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
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