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Winedev Guide

Wine Developer's Guide explains how to debug Wine. Explains debugging techniques and Writing Conformance tests. Outlines architecture of Wine and graphics modules.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

215 views

Winedev Guide

Wine Developer's Guide explains how to debug Wine. Explains debugging techniques and Writing Conformance tests. Outlines architecture of Wine and graphics modules.

Uploaded by

Margo Smith

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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Wine Developers Guide

Table of Contents
I. Developing Wine ...................................................................................................................................................... iv 1. Debugging Wine ............................................................................................................................................... 1 2. Debug Logging ............................................................................................................................................... 21 3. Other debugging techniques ........................................................................................................................... 27 4. Coding Practice............................................................................................................................................... 32 5. Writing Conformance tests ............................................................................................................................. 37 6. Documenting Wine ......................................................................................................................................... 45 II. Wine Architecture ................................................................................................................................................. 60 7. Overview......................................................................................................................................................... 61 8. Kernel modules ............................................................................................................................................... 71 9. Graphical modules .......................................................................................................................................... 95 10. Windowing system........................................................................................................................................ 96 11. COM in Wine.............................................................................................................................................. 102 12. Wine and OpenGL ...................................................................................................................................... 114 13. Outline of DirectDraw Architecture ........................................................................................................... 118 14. Wine and Multimedia ................................................................................................................................. 120

iii

I. Developing Wine

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Introduction
Processes and threads: in underlying OS and in Windows
Before going into the depths of debugging in Wine, heres a small overview of process and thread handling in Wine. It has to be clear that there are two different beasts: processes/threads from the Unix point of view and processes/threads from a Windows point of view. Each Windows thread is implemented as a Unix thread, meaning that all threads of a same Windows process share the same (unix) address space. In the following:
W-process U-process W-thread

means a process in Windows terminology means a process in Unix terminology

means a thread in Windows terminology

A W-process is made of one or several W-threads. Each W-thread is mapped to one and only one U-process. All U-processes of a same W-process share the same address space. Each Unix process can be identied by two values:

the Unix process id (upid in the following) the Windowss thread id (tid)

Each Windows process has also a Windows process id (wpid in the following). It must be clear that upid and wpid are different and shall not be used instead of the other.
Wpid and tid are dened (Windows) system wide. They must not be confused with process or thread handles which,

as any handle, is an indirection to a system object (in this case process or thread). A same process can have several different handles on the same kernel object. The handles can be dened as local (the values is only valid in a process), or system wide (the same handle can be used by any W-process).

Wine, debugging and WineDbg

When talking of debugging in Wine, there are at least two levels to think of:

the Windows debugging API. the Wine integrated debugger, dubbed winedbg.

Wine implements most of the Windows debugging API. The rst part of the debugging APIs (in KERNEL32.DLL) allows a W-process, called the debugger, to control the execution of another W-process, the debuggee. To control means stopping/resuming execution, enabling/disabling single stepping, setting breakpoints, reading/writing debuggee memory... Another part of the debugging APIs resides in DBGHELP.DLL (and its ancestor IMAGEHLP.DLL) and lets a debugger look into symbols and types from any module (if the module has been compiled with the proper options). winedbg is a Winelib application making use of these APIs (KERNEL32.DLLs debugging API and DBGHELP.DLL) to allow debugging both any Wine or Winelib applications as well as Wine itself (kernel and all DLLs).

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

WineDbgs modes of invocation

Starting a process
Any application (either a Windows native executable, or a Winelib application) can be run through winedbg. Command line options and tricks are the same as for wine:
winedbg telnet.exe winedbg hl.exe -windowed

Attaching
winedbg can also be launched without any command line argument: winedbg is started without any attached process. You can get a list of running W-processes (and their wpids) using the info process command, and then, with the attach command, pick up the wpid of the W-process you want to debug. This is a neat feature as it allows you to debug an already started application.

On exceptions
When something goes wrong, Windows tracks this as an exception. Exceptions exist for segmentation violation, stack overow, division by zero, etc. When an exception occurs, Wine checks if the W-process is debugged. If so, the exception event is sent to the debugger, which takes care of it: end of the story. This mechanism is part of the standard Windows debugging API. If the W-process is not debugged, Wine tries to launch a debugger. This debugger (normally winedbg, see III Conguration for more details), at startup, attaches to the W-process which generated the exception event. In this case, you are able to look at the causes of the exception, and either x the causes (and continue further the execution) or dig deeper to understand what went wrong. If winedbg is the standard debugger, the pass and cont commands are the two ways to let the process go further for the handling of the exception event. To be more precise on the way Wine (and Windows) generates exception events, when a fault occurs (segmentation violation, stack overow...), the event is rst sent to the debugger (this is known as a rst chance exception). The debugger can give two answers: continue the debugger had the ability to correct whats generated the exception, and is now able to continue process execution. pass the debugger couldnt correct the cause of the rst chance exception. Wine will now try to walk the list of exception handlers to see if one of them can handle the exception. If no exception handler is found, the exception is sent once again to the debugger to indicate the failure of the exception handling.
Note: since some of Wines code uses exceptions and try/catch blocks to provide some functionality, winedbg can be entered in such cases with segv exceptions. This happens, for example, with IsBadReadPtr function. In that case, the pass command shall be used, to let the handling of the exception to be done by the catch block in IsBadReadPtr.

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Interrupting
You can stop the debugger while its running by hitting Ctrl-C in its window. This will stop the debugged process, and let you manipulate the current context.

Quitting
Wine supports the new XP APIs, allowing for a debugger to detach from a program being debugged (see detach command).

Using the Wine Debugger

This section describes where to start debugging Wine. If at any point you get stuck and want to ask for help, please read the How to Report A Bug section of the Wine Users Guide for information on how to write useful bug reports.

Steps to debug a crash. You may stop at any step, but please report the bug and provide as much of the information gathered to the bug report as feasible. 1. Get the reason for the crash. This is usually an access to an invalid selector, an access to an out of range address in a valid selector, popping a segment register from the stack or the like. When reporting a crash, report this whole crashdump even if it doesnt make sense to you. (In this case it is access to an invalid selector, for %es is 0000, as seen in the register dump).

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

2. Determine the cause of the crash. Since this is usually a primary/secondary reaction to a failed or misbehaving Wine function, rerun Wine with the WINEDEBUG=+relay environment variable set. This will generate quite a lot of output, but usually the reason is located in the last call(s). Those lines usually look like this:
|Call KERNEL.90: LSTRLEN(0227:0692 "text") ret=01e7:2ce7 ds=0227 ^^^^^^^^^ ^ ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^ | | | | | |Datasegment | | | | |Return address | | | |textual parameter | | | | | |Argument(s). This one is a win16 segmented pointer. | |Function called. |The module, the function is called in. In this case it is KERNEL. |Ret KERNEL.90: LSTRLEN() retval=0x0004 ret=01e7:2ce7 ds=0227 ^^^^^^ |Returnvalue is 16 bit and has the value 4.

3. If you have found a misbehaving Wine function, try to nd out why it misbehaves. Find the function in the source code. Try to make sense of the arguments passed. Usually there is a WINE_DEFAULT_DEBUG_CHANNEL(<channel>); at the beginning of the source le. Rerun wine with the WINEDEBUG=+xyz,+relay environment variable set. Occasionally there are additional debug channels dened at the beginning of the source le in the form WINE_DECLARE_DEBUG_CHANNEL(<channel>); If so the offending function may also uses one of these alternate channels. Look through the the function for TRACE_(<channel>)(" ... /n"); and add any additional channels to the commandline.

4. Additional information on how to debug using the internal debugger can be found in programs/winedbg/README. 5. If this information isnt clear enough or if you want to know more about whats happening in the function itself, try running wine with WINEDEBUG=+all, which dumps ALL included debug information in wine. It is often necessary to limit the debug output produced. That can be done by piping the output through grep, or alternatively with registry keys. See the Section called Conguring +relay behaviour for more information. 6. If even that isnt enough, add more debug output for yourself into the functions you nd relevant. See The section on Debug Logging in this guide for more information. You might also try to run the program in gdb instead of using the Wine debugger. If you do that, use handle SIGSEGV nostop noprint to disable the handling of seg faults inside gdb (needed for Win16). 7. You can also set a breakpoint for that function. Start wine using winedbg instead of wine. Once the debugger is running enter break KERNEL_LSTRLEN (replace by function you want to debug, CASE IS RELEVANT) to set a breakpoint. Then use continue to start normal program-execution. Wine will stop if it reaches the breakpoint. If the program isnt yet at the crashing call of that function, use continue again until you are about to enter that function. You may now proceed with single-stepping the function until you reach the point of crash. Use the other debugger commands to print registers and the like.

Program hangs, nothing happens

Start the program with winedbg instead of wine. When the program locks up switch to the winedbgs terminal and press Ctrl-C. This will stop the program and let you debug the program as you would for a crash.

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Program reports an error with a Messagebox

Sometimes programs are reporting failure using more or less nondescript messageboxes. We can debug this using the same method as Crashes, but there is one problem... For setting up a message box the program also calls Wine producing huge chunks of debug code. Since the failure happens usually directly before setting up the Messagebox you can start winedbg and set a breakpoint at MessageBoxA (called by win16 and win32 programs) and proceed with continue. With WINEDEBUG=+all Wine will now stop directly before setting up the Messagebox. Proceed as explained above. You can also run wine using WINEDEBUG=+relay wine program.exe 2>&1 | less -i and in less search for MessageBox.

Disassembling programs
You may also try to disassemble the offending program to check for undocumented features and/or use of them. The best, freely available, disassembler for Win16 programs is Windows Codeback, archive name wcbxxx.zip (e.g. wcb105a.zip). Disassembling win32 programs is possible using eg. GoVest by Ansgar Trimborn. It can be found here (http://www.oocities.com/govest/). You can also use the newer and better Interactive Disassembler (IDA) from DataRescue. Take a look in the AppDB (http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=565) for links to various versions of IDA. Another popular disassembler is Windows Disassembler 32 from URSoft. Look for a le called w32dsm87.zip (or similar) on winsite.com (http://www.winsite.com/) or softpedia.com (http://www.softpedia.com/). It seems that Windows Disassembler 32 currently has problems working correctly under Wine, so use IDA or GoVest. Also of considerable fame amongst disassemblers is SoftIce from NuMega. That software has since been acquired by CompuWare (http://www.compuware.com/) and made part of their Windows driver development suite. Newer versions of SoftIce needs to run as a Windows Service and therefore wont currently work under Wine. If nothing works for you, you might try one of the disassemblers found in Googles directory (http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Disassemblers/DOS_and_Windows/). Understanding disassembled code is mostly a question of exercise. Most code out there uses standard C function entries (for it is usually written in C). Win16 function entries usually look like that:
push bp mov bp, sp ... function code .. retf XXXX <--------- XXXX is number of bytes of arguments

This is a FAR function with no local storage. The arguments usually start at [bp+6] with increasing offsets. Note, that [bp+6] belongs to the rightmost argument, for exported win16 functions use the PASCAL calling convention. So, if we use strcmp(a,b) with a and b both 32 bit variables b would be at [bp+6] and a at [bp+10]. Most functions make also use of local storage in the stackframe:
enter 0086, 00 ... function code ... leave retf XXXX

This does mostly the same as above, but also adds 0x86 bytes of stackstorage, which is accessed using [bp-xx]. Before calling a function, arguments are pushed on the stack using something like this:
push word ptr [bp-02] <- will be at [bp+8]

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

push di <- will be at [bp+6] call KERNEL.LSTRLEN

Here rst the selector and then the offset to the passed string are pushed.

Sample debugging session

Lets debug the infamous Word SHARE.EXE messagebox:
|marcus@jet $ wine winword.exe | +---------------------------------------------+ | | ! You must leave Windows and load SHARE.EXE| | | before starting Word. | | +---------------------------------------------+ |marcus@jet $ WINEDEBUG=+relay,-debug wine winword.exe |CallTo32(wndproc=0x40065bc0,hwnd=000001ac,msg=00000081,wp=00000000,lp=00000000) |Win16 task winword: Breakpoint 1 at 0x01d7:0x001a |CallTo16(func=0127:0070,ds=0927) |Call WPROCS.24: TASK_RESCHEDULE() ret=00b7:1456 ds=0927 |Ret WPROCS.24: TASK_RESCHEDULE() retval=0x8672 ret=00b7:1456 ds=0927 |CallTo16(func=01d7:001a,ds=0927) | AX=0000 BX=3cb4 CX=1f40 DX=0000 SI=0000 DI=0927 BP=0000 ES=11f7 |Loading symbols: /home/marcus/wine/wine... |Stopped on breakpoint 1 at 0x01d7:0x001a |In 16 bit mode. |Wine-dbg>break MessageBoxA <---- Set Breakpoint |Breakpoint 2 at 0x40189100 (MessageBoxA [msgbox.c:190]) |Wine-dbg>c <---- Continue |Call KERNEL.91: INITTASK() ret=0157:0022 ds=08a7 | AX=0000 BX=3cb4 CX=1f40 DX=0000 SI=0000 DI=08a7 ES=11d7 EFL=00000286 |CallTo16(func=090f:085c,ds=0dcf,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0000,0x0800,0x0000,0x0000,0x0dcf) |... <----- Much debugoutput |Call KERNEL.136: GETDRIVETYPE(0x0000) ret=060f:097b ds=0927 ^^^^^^ Drive 0 (A:) |Ret KERNEL.136: GETDRIVETYPE() retval=0x0002 ret=060f:097b ds=0927 ^^^^^^ DRIVE_REMOVEABLE (It is a floppy diskdrive.) |Call KERNEL.136: GETDRIVETYPE(0x0001) ret=060f:097b ds=0927 ^^^^^^ Drive 1 (B:) |Ret KERNEL.136: GETDRIVETYPE() retval=0x0000 ret=060f:097b ds=0927 ^^^^^^ DRIVE_CANNOTDETERMINE (I dont have drive B: assigned) |Call KERNEL.136: GETDRIVETYPE(0x0002) ret=060f:097b ds=0927 ^^^^^^^ Drive 2 (C:) |Ret KERNEL.136: GETDRIVETYPE() retval=0x0003 ret=060f:097b ds=0927 ^^^^^^ DRIVE_FIXED (specified as a harddisk) |Call KERNEL.97: GETTEMPFILENAME(0x00c3,0x09278364"doc",0x0000,0927:8248) ret=060f:09b1 ds=0927 ^^^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ | | |buffer for fname | |temporary name ~docXXXX.tmp |Force use of Drive C:.

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

|Warning: GetTempFileName returns C:~doc9281.tmp, which doesnt seem to be writable. |Please check your configuration file if this generates a failure.

Whoops, it even detects that something is wrong!

|Ret KERNEL.97: GETTEMPFILENAME() retval=0x9281 ret=060f:09b1 ds=0927 ^^^^^^ Temporary storage ID

This fails, since my C: drive is in this case mounted readonly.

|Ret KERNEL.74: OPENFILE() retval=0xffff ret=060f:09d8 ds=0927 ^^^^^^ HFILE_ERROR16, yes, it failed.

|Call USER.1: MESSAGEBOX(0x0000,0x09278376"You must close Windows and load SHARE.EXE before you st

And MessageBoxed.
|Stopped on breakpoint 2 at 0x40189100 (MessageBoxA [msgbox.c:190]) |190 { <- the sourceline In 32 bit mode. Wine-dbg>

The code seems to nd a writable harddisk and tries to create a le there. To work around this bug, you can dene C: as a networkdrive, which is ignored by the code above.

Debugging Tips
Here are some additional debugging tips:

If you have a program crashing at such an early loader phase that you cant use the Wine debugger normally, but Wine already executes the programs start code, then you may use a special trick. You should do a
WINEDEBUG=+relay wine program

to get a listing of the functions the program calls in its start function. Now you do a
winedbg winfile.exe

This way, you get into winedbg. Now you can set a breakpoint on any function the program calls in the start function and just type c to bypass the eventual calls of Winle to this function until you are nally at the place where this function gets called by the crashing start function. Now you can proceed with your debugging as usual.

If you try to run a program and it quits after showing an error messagebox, the problem can usually be identied in the return value of one of the functions executed before MessageBox(). Thats why you should re-run the program with e.g.
WINEDEBUG=+relay wine <program name> &>relmsg

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Then do a more relmsg and search for the last occurrence of a call to the string "MESSAGEBOX". This is a line like

Call USER.1: MESSAGEBOX(0x0000,0x01ff1246 "Runtime error 219 at 0004:1056.",0x00000000,0x1010) r

In my example the lines before the call to MessageBox() look like that:

Call KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY(0x0347) ret=01cf:1033 ds=01ff CallTo16(func=033f:0072,ds=01ff,0x0000) Ret KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY() retval=0x0001 ret=01cf:1033 ds=01ff Call KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY(0x036f) ret=01cf:1043 ds=01ff CallTo16(func=0367:0072,ds=01ff,0x0000) Ret KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY() retval=0x0001 ret=01cf:1043 ds=01ff Call KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY(0x031f) ret=01cf:105c ds=01ff CallTo16(func=0317:0072,ds=01ff,0x0000) Ret KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY() retval=0x0001 ret=01cf:105c ds=01ff Call USER.171: WINHELP(0x02ac,0x01ff05b4 "COMET.HLP",0x0002,0x00000000) ret=01cf:1070 ds=01ff CallTo16(func=0117:0080,ds=01ff) Call WPROCS.24: TASK_RESCHEDULE() ret=00a7:0a2d ds=002b Ret WPROCS.24: TASK_RESCHEDULE() retval=0x0000 ret=00a7:0a2d ds=002b Ret USER.171: WINHELP() retval=0x0001 ret=01cf:1070 ds=01ff Call KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY(0x01be) ret=01df:3e29 ds=01ff Ret KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY() retval=0x0000 ret=01df:3e29 ds=01ff Call KERNEL.52: FREEPROCINSTANCE(0x02cf00ba) ret=01f7:1460 ds=01ff Ret KERNEL.52: FREEPROCINSTANCE() retval=0x0001 ret=01f7:1460 ds=01ff Call USER.1: MESSAGEBOX(0x0000,0x01ff1246 "Runtime error 219 at 0004:1056.",0x00000000,0x1010) r

I think that the call to MessageBox() in this example is not caused by a wrong result value of some previously executed function (its happening quite often like that), but instead the messagebox complains about a runtime error at 0x0004:0x1056. As the segment value of the address is only 4, I think that that is only an internal program value. But the offset address reveals something quite interesting: Offset 1056 is very close to the return address of FREELIBRARY():
Call KERNEL.96: FREELIBRARY(0x031f) ret=01cf:105c ds=01ff ^^^^

Provided that segment 0x0004 is indeed segment 0x1cf, we now we can use IDA to disassemble the part that caused the error. We just have to nd the address of the call to FreeLibrary(). Some lines before that the runtime error occurred. But be careful! In some cases you dont have to disassemble the main program, but instead some DLL called by it in order to nd the correct place where the runtime error occurred. That can be determined by nding the origin of the segment value (in this case 0x1cf).

If you have created a relay le of some crashing program and want to set a breakpoint at a certain location which is not yet available as the program loads the breakpoints segment during execution, you may set a breakpoint to GetVersion16/32 as those functions are called very often. Then do a c until you are able to set this breakpoint without error message.

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Some basic debugger usages

After starting your program with
winedbg myprog.exe

the program loads and you get a prompt at the program starting point. Then you can set breakpoints:
b RoutineName b *0x812575 (by routine name) OR (by address)

Then you hit c (continue) to run the program. It stops at the breakpoint. You can type
step stepi (to step one line) OR (to step one machine instruction at a time; here, it helps to know the basic 386 instruction set) info reg (to see registers) info stack (to see hex values in the stack) info local (to see local variables) list <line number> (to list source code) x <variable name> (to examine a variable; only works if code is not compiled with optimization) x 0x4269978 (to examine a memory location) ? (help) q (quit)

By hitting Enter, you repeat the last command.

Useful programs
Some useful programs: GoVest: govest.zip is available from http://www.oocities.com/govest/. Simple win32 disassembler that works well with Wine. IDA: IDA Pro is highly recommended, but is not free. DataRescue does however make trial versions available. Take a look in the AppDB (http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=565) for links to various versions of IDA.

XRAY:

http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pub/pc/sysinfo/xray15.zip (http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pub/pc/sysinfo/xray15.zip)

Traces DOS calls (Int 21h, DPMI, ...). Use it with Windows to correct le management problems etc. pedump:
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/win95/prog/pedump.zip (ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/win95/prog/pedump.zip)

Dumps the imports and exports of a PE (Portable Executable) DLL. winedump: (included in wine tree) Dumps the imports and exports of a PE (Portable Executable) DLL.

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Useful memory addresses

Wine uses several different kinds of memory addresses. Win32/"normal" Wine addresses/Linux: linear addresses. Linear addresses can be everything from 0x0 up to 0xffffffff. In Wine on Linux they are often around e.g. 0x08000000, 0x00400000 (std. Win32 program load address), 0x40000000. Every Win32 process has its own private 4GB address space (that is, from 0x0 up to 0xffffffff). Win16 "enhanced mode": segmented addresses. These are the "normal" Win16 addresses, called SEGPTR. They have a segment:offset notation, e.g. 0x01d7:0x0012. The segment part usually is a "selector", which always has the lowest 3 bits set. Some sample selectors are 0x1f7, 0x16f, 0x8f. If these bits are set except for the lowest bit, as e.g. with 0x1f6,xi then it might be a handle to global memory. Just set the lowest bit to get the selector in these cases. A selector kind of "points" to a certain linear (see above) base address. It has more or less three important attributes: segment base address, segment limit, segment access rights. Example: Selector 0x1f7 (0x40320000, 0x0000ffff, r-x) So 0x1f7 has a base address of 0x40320000, the segments last address is 0x4032ffff (limit 0xffff), and its readable and executable. So an address of 0x1f7:0x2300 would be the linear address of 0x40322300.

DOS/Win16 "standard mode" They, too, have a segment:offset notation. But they are completely different from "normal" Win16 addresses, as they just represent at most 1MB of memory: The segment part can be anything from 0 to 0xffff, and its the same with the offset part. Now the strange thing is the calculation thats behind these addresses: Just calculate segment*16 + offset in order to get a "linear DOS" address. So e.g. 0x0f04:0x3628 results in 0xf040 + 0x3628 = 0x12668. And the highest address you can get is 0xfffff (1MB), of course. In Wine, this "linear DOS" address of 0x12668 has to be added to the linear base address of the corresponding DOS memory allocated for dosmod in order to get the true linear address of a DOS seg:offs address. And make sure that youre doing this in the correct process with the correct linear address space, of course ;-)

Conguration
Windows Debugging conguration
The Windows debugging API uses a registry entry to know which debugger to invoke when an unhandled exception occurs (see On exceptions for some details). Two values in key
[MACHINE\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\AeDebug]

Determine the behavior: Debugger This is the command line used to launch the debugger (it uses two printf formats (%ld) to pass context dependent information to the debugger). You should put here a complete path to your debugger (winedbg can of course be used, but any other Windows debugging API aware debugger will do). The path to the debugger

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

you choose to use must be reachable via one of the DOS drives congured under /dosdevices in your $WINEPREFIX or ~/.wine folder. Auto If this value is zero, a message box will ask the user if he/she wishes to launch the debugger when an unhandled exception occurs. Otherwise, the debugger is automatically started. A regular Wine registry looks like:
[MACHINE\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\AeDebug] 957636538 "Auto"=dword:00000001 "Debugger"="winedbg %ld %ld"

Note 1: Creating this key is mandatory. Not doing so will not re the debugger when an exception occurs.

Note 2: wineinstall (available in Wine source) sets up this correctly. However, due to some limitation of the registry installed, if a previous Wine installation exists, its safer to remove the whole
[MACHINE\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\AeDebug]

key before running again wineinstall to regenerate this key.

WineDbg conguration
winedbg can be congured through a number of options. Those options are stored in the registry, on a per user basis. The key is (in my registry)
[HKCU\\Software\\Wine\\WineDbg]

Those options can be read/written while inside winedbg, as part of the debugger expressions. To refer to one of these options, its name must be prexed by a $ sign. For example,
set $BreakAllThreadsStartup = 1

sets the option BreakAllThreadsStartup to TRUE. All the options are read from the registry when winedbg starts (if no corresponding value is found, a default value is used), and are written back to the registry when winedbg exits (hence, all modications to those options are automatically saved when winedbg terminates). Heres the list of all options:
BreakAllThreadsStartup

Set to TRUE if at all threads start-up the debugger stops set to FALSE if only at the rst thread startup of a given process the debugger stops. FALSE by default.
BreakOnCritSectTimeOut

Set to TRUE if the debugger stops when a critical section times out (5 minutes); TRUE by default.
BreakOnAttach

Set to TRUE if when winedbg attaches to an existing process after an unhandled exception, winedbg shall be entered on the rst attach event. Since the attach event is meaningless in the context of an exception event (the next event which is the exception event is of course relevant), that option is likely to be FALSE.

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

BreakOnFirstChance

An exception can generate two debug events. The rst one is passed to the debugger (known as a rst chance) just after the exception. The debugger can then decide either to resume execution (see winedbgs cont command) or pass the exception up to the exception handler chain in the program (if it exists) (winedbg implements this through the pass command). If none of the exception handlers takes care of the exception, the exception event is sent again to the debugger (known as last chance exception). You cannot pass on a last exception. When the BreakOnFirstChance exception is TRUE, then winedbg is entered for both rst and last chance execptions (to FALSE, its only entered for last chance exceptions).
AlwaysShowThunk

Set to TRUE if the debugger, when looking up for a symbol from its name, displays all the thunks with that name. The default value (FALSE) allows not to have to choose between a symbol and all the import thunks from all the DLLs using that symbols.

Conguring +relay behaviour

When setting WINEDEBUG to +relay and debugging, you might get a lot of output. You can limit the output by conguring the value RelayExclude in the registry, located under the key:
[HKCU\\Software\\Wine\\Debug]

Set the value of RelayExclude to a semicolon-separated list of calls to exclude. Example: "RtlEnterCriticalSection;RtlLeaveCriticalSection;kernel32.97;kernel32.98". RelayInclude is an option similar to RelayExclude, except that functions listed here will be the only ones included in the output. Also see section 3.4.3.5 for more options. If your application runs too slow with +relay to get meaningful output and youre stuck with multi-GB relay log les, but youre not sure what to exclude, heres a trick to get you started. First, run your application for a minute or so, piping its output to a le on disk:
WINEDEBUG=+relay wine <appname.exe> &>relay.log

Then run this command to see which calls are performed the most:
awk -F( {print $1} < relay.log | awk {print $2} | sort | uniq -c | sort

Exclude the bottom-most calls with RelayExclude after making sure that they are irrelevant, then run your application again.

WineDbg Expressions and Variables

Expressions
Expressions in Wine Debugger are mostly written in a C form. However, there are a few discrepancies:

Identiers can take a ! in their names. This allow mainly to access symbols from different DLLs like USER32!CreateWindowExA. In cast operation, when specifying a structure or an union, you must use the struct or union keyword (even if your program uses a typedef).

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

When specifying an identier by its name, if several symbols with the same name exist, the debugger will prompt for the symbol you want to use. Pick up the one you want from its number. In lots of cases, you can also use regular expressions for looking for a symbol. winedbg denes its own set of variables. The conguration variables from above are part of them. Some others include:
$ThreadId

ID of the W-thread currently examined by the debugger

$ProcessId

ID of the W-thread currently examined by the debugger <registers> All CPU registers are also available, using $ as a prex. You can use info regs to get a list of avaible CPU registers

The $ThreadId and $ProcessId variables can be handy to set conditional breakpoints on a given thread or process.

WineDbg Command Reference

Misc
Table 1-1. WineDbgs misc. commands abort quit attach N aborts the debugger exits the debugger attach to a W-process (N is its ID, numeric or hexadecimal (0xN)). IDs can be obtained using the info process command. Note the info process command returns hexadecimal values. detach from a W-process. prints some help on the commands prints some help on info commands

detach help help info

Flow control
Table 1-2. WineDbgs ow control commands cont, c pass continue execution until next breakpoint or exception. pass the exception event up to the lter chain.

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

step, s next, n stepi, si nexti, ni nish, f

continue execution until next C line of code (enters function call) continue execution until next C line of code (doesnt enter function call) execute next assembly instruction (enters function call) execute next assembly instruction (doesnt enter function call) execute until current function is exited

cont, step, next, stepi, nexti can be postxed by a number (N), meaning that the command must be executed N times.

Breakpoints, watch points

Table 1-3. WineDbgs break & watch points enable N disable N delete N cond N cond N <expr> enables (break|watch)point #N disables (break|watch)point #N deletes (break|watch)point #N removes any existing condition to (break|watch)point N adds condition <expr> to (break|watch)point N. <expr> will be evaluated each time the breakpoint is hit. If the result is a zero value, the breakpoint isnt triggered adds a breakpoint at address N adds a breakpoint at the address of symbol <id> adds a breakpoint at the address of symbol <id> (N ?) adds a breakpoint at line N of current source le adds a breakpoint at current $PC address adds a watch command (on write) at address N (on 4 bytes) adds a watch command (on write) at the address of symbol <id> lists all (break|watch)points (with state)

break * N break <id> break <id> N break N break watch * N watch <id> info break

You can use the symbol EntryPoint to stand for the entry point of the Dll. When setting a break/watch-point by <id>, if the symbol cannot be found (for example, the symbol is contained in a not yet loaded module), winedbg will recall the name of the symbol and will try to set the breakpoint each time a new module is loaded (until it succeeds).

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Stack manipulation
Table 1-4. WineDbgs stack manipulation bt bt N print calling stack of current thread print calling stack of thread of ID N (note: this doesnt change the position of the current frame as manipulated by the up and dn commands) goes up one frame in current threads stack goes up N frames in current threads stack goes down one frame in current threads stack goes down N frames in current threads stack set N as the current frame for current threads stack prints information on local variables for current function frame

up up N dn dn N frame N info local

Directory & source le manipulation

Table 1-5. WineDbgs directory & source le manipulation show dir dir <pathname> dir symbolle <pathname> symbolle <pathname> N list list list N list <path>:N list <id> list * N prints the list of dir:s where source les are looked for adds <pathname> to the list of dir:s where to look for source les deletes the list of dir:s where to look for source les loads external symbol denition loads external symbol denition (applying an offset of N to addresses) lists 10 source lines forwards from current position lists 10 source lines backwards from current position lists 10 source lines from line N in current le lists 10 source lines from line N in le <path> lists 10 source lines of function <id> lists 10 source lines from address N

You can specify the end target (to change the 10 lines value) using the ,. For example: Table 1-6. WineDbgs list command examples list 123, 234 list foo.c:1, 56 lists source lines from line 123 up to line 234 in current le lists source lines from line 1 up to 56 in le foo.c

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

Displaying
A display is an expression thats evaluated and printed after the execution of any winedbg command. winedbg will automatically detect if the expression you entered contains a local variable. If so, display will only be shown if the context is still in the same function as the one the debugger was in when the display expression was entered. Table 1-7. WineDbgs displays info display display display <expr> display /fmt <expr> lists the active displays print the active displays values (as done each time the debugger stops) adds a display for expression <expr> adds a display for expression <expr>. Printing evaluated <expr> is done using the given format (see print command for more on formats) deletes display #N

del display N , undisplay N

Disassembly
Table 1-8. WineDbgs dissassembly disas disas <expr> disas <expr>,<expr> disassemble from current position disassemble from address <expr> disassembles code between addresses specied by the two <expr>

Memory (reading, writing, typing)

Table 1-9. WineDbgs memory management x <expr> x /fmt <expr> print <expr> print /fmt <expr> set <lval> = <expr> whatis <expr> examines memory at <expr> address examines memory at <expr> address using format /fmt prints the value of <expr> (possibly using its type) prints the value of <expr> (possibly using its type) writes the value of <expr> in <lval> prints the C type of expression <expr>

/fmt is either /<letter> or /<count><letter> letter can be

an ASCII string

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

u i x d w c b g

an Unicode UTF16 string instructions (disassemble) 32 bit unsigned hexadecimal integer 32 bit signed decimal integer 16 bit unsigned hexadecimal integer character (only printable 0x20-0x7f are actually printed) 8 bit unsigned hexadecimal integer GUID

Information on Wines internals

Table 1-10. WineDbgs Win32 objects management info class info class <id> info share info share <N> info regs info all-regs info segment <N> info segment info stack info map info map <N> info wnd <N> info wnd info process info thread info exception lists all Windows classes registered in Wine prints information on Windowss class <id> lists all the dynamic libraries loaded in the debugged program (including .so les, NE and PE DLLs) prints information on module at address <N> prints the value of the CPU registers prints the value of the CPU and Floating Point registers prints information on segment <N> (i386 only) lists all allocated segments (i386 only) prints the values on top of the stack lists all virtual mappings used by the debugged program lists all virtual mappings used by the program of pid < N> prints information of Window of handle <N> lists all the window hierarchy starting from the desktop window lists all w-processes in Wine session lists all w-threads in Wine session lists the exception frames (starting from current stack frame)

Debug channels
It is possible to turn on and off debug messages as you are debugging using the set command. See Chapter 2 for more details on debug channels. Table 1-11. WineDbgs debug channels management set + warn win set + win turn on warn on win channel turn on warn/xme/err/trace on win channel

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

set - win set - xme

turn off warn/xme/err/trace on win channel turn off the xme class

Other debuggers
GDB mode
WineDbg can act as a remote monitor for GDB. This allows to use all the power of GDB, but while debugging wine and/or any Win32 application. To enable this mode, just add --gdb to winedbg command line. Youll end up on a GDB prompt. Youll have to use the GDB commands (not WineDbgs). However, some limitation in GDB while debugging wine (see below) dont appear in this mode:

GDB will correctly present Win32 thread information and breakpoint behavior Moreover, it also provides support for the Dwarf II debug format (which became the default format (instead of stabs) in gcc 3.1).

A few Wine extensions available through the monitor command. Table 1-12. WineDbgs debug channels management monitor wnd monitor proc monitor mem lists all window in the Wine session lists all processes in the Wine session displays memory mapping of debugged process

Graphical frontends to gdb

This section will describe how you can debug Wine using the GDB mode of winedbg and some graphical front ends to GDB for those of you who really like graphical debuggers.

DDD
Use the following steps, in this order: 1. Start the Wine debugger with a command line like:
winedbg --gdb --no-start <name_of_exe_to_debug.exe>

2. Start ddd 3. In ddd, use the Open File or Open Program to point to the Wine executable (which is either wine-pthread or wine-kthread depending on your settings). 4. In the output of 1/, theres a line like
target remote localhost:32878

copy that line and paste into ddd command pane (the one with the (gdb) prompt)

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

The program should now be loaded and up and running. If you want, you can also add in 1/ after the name of the exec all the needed parameters

kdbg
Use the following steps, in this order: 1. Start the Wine debugger with a command line like:
winedbg --gdb --no-start <name_of_exe_to_debug.exe>

2. In the output of 1/, theres a line like

target remote localhost:32878

Start kdbg with

kdbg -r localhost:32878 wine

localhost:32878 is not a xed value, but has been printed in step 1/. wine should also be the full path to the Wine executable (which is either wine-pthread or wine-kthread depending on your settings). The program should now be loaded and up and running. If you want, you can also add in 1/ after the name of the exec all the needed parameters

Using other Unix debuggers

You can also use other debuggers (like gdb), but you must be aware of a few items: You need to attach the unix debugger to the correct unix process (representing the correct windows thread) (you can "guess" it from a ps fax for example: When running the emulator, usually the rst two upids are for the Windows application running the desktop, the rst thread of the application is generally the third upid; when running a Winelib program, the rst thread of the application is generally the rst upid)
Note: If you plan to used gdb for a multi-threaded Wine application (native or Winelib), then gdb will be able to handle the multiple threads directly only if:
Wine is running on the pthread model (it wont work in the kthread one). See the Wine architecture

documentation for further details.

gdb supports the multi-threading (you need gdb at least 5.0 for that).

In the unfortunate case (no direct thread support in gdb because one of the above conditions is false), youll have to spawn a different gdb session for each Windows thread you wish to debug (which means no synchronization for debugging purposes between the various threads).

Heres how to get info about the current execution status of a certain Wine process: Change into your Wine source dir and enter:
$ gdb wine

Switch to another console and enter ps ax | grep wine to nd all wine processes. Inside gdb, repeat for all Wine processes:
(gdb) attach PID

with PID being the process ID of one of the Wine processes. Use

Chapter 1. Debugging Wine

(gdb) bt

to get the backtrace of the current Wine process, i.e. the function call history. That way you can nd out what the current process is doing right now. And then you can use several times:
(gdb) n

or maybe even
(gdb) b SomeFunction

and
(gdb) c

to set a breakpoint at a certain function and continue up to that function. Finally you can enter
(gdb) detach

to detach from the Wine process.

Using other Windows debuggers

You can use any Windows debugging API compliant debugger with Wine. Some reports have been made of success with VisualStudio debugger (in remote mode, only the hub runs in Wine). GoVest fully runs in Wine.

Main differences between winedbg and regular Unix debuggers

Table 1-13. Debuggers comparison WineDbg WineDbg debugs a Windows process: the various threads will be handled by the same WineDbg session, and a breakpoint will be triggered for any thread of the W-process WineDbg supports debug information from stabs (standard Unix format) and Microsofts C, CodeView, .DBG gdb gdb debugs a Windows thread: a separate gdb session is needed for each thread of a Windows process and a breakpoint will be triggered only for the w-thread debugged GDB supports debug information from stabs (standard Unix format) and Dwarf II.

Chapter 2. Debug Logging

To better manage the large volume of debugging messages that Wine can generate, we divide the messages on a component basis, and classify them based on the severity of the reported problem. Therefore a message belongs to a channel and a class respectively. This section will describe the debugging classes, how you can create a new debugging channel, what the debugging API is, and how you can control the debugging output. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a few examples of the debugging API in action:
ERR("lock_count == 0 ... please report\n"); FIXME("Unsupported RTL style!\n"); WARN(": file seems to be truncated!\n"); TRACE("[%p]: new horz extent = %d\n", hwnd, extent ); MESSAGE( "Could not create graphics driver %s\n", buffer );

Debugging classes
A debugging class categorizes a message based on the severity of the reported problem. There is a xed set of classes, and you must carefully choose the appropriate one for your messages. There are ve classes of messages:
FIXME

Messages in this class are meant to signal unimplemented features, known bugs, etc. They serve as a constant and active reminder of what needs to be done.
ERR

Messages in this class indicate serious errors in Wine, such as as conditions that should never happen by design.
WARN

These are warning messages. You should report a warning when something unwanted happens, and the function cannot deal with the condition. This is seldomly used since proper functions can usually report failures back to the caller. Think twice before making the message a warning.
TRACE

These are detailed debugging messages that are mainly useful to debug a component. These are turned off unless explicitly enabled.
MESSAGE

There messages are intended for the end user. They do not belong to any channel. As with warnings, you will seldomly need to output such messages.

Debugging channels
Each component is assigned a debugging channel. The identier of the channel must be a valid C identier (reserved word like int or static are premitted). To use a new channel, simply use it in your code. It will be picked up automatically by the build process. Typically, a le contains code pertaining to only one component, and as such, there is only one channel to output to. You can declare a default chanel for the le using the WINE_DEFAULT_DEBUG_CHANNEL() macro:
#include "wine/debug.h"

Chapter 2. Debug Logging

WINE_DEFAULT_DEBUG_CHANNEL(xxx); ... FIXME("some unimplemented feature", ...); ... if (zero != 0) ERR("This should never be non-null: %d", zero); ...

In rare situations there is a need to output to more than one debug channel per le. In such cases, you need to declare all the additional channels at the top of the le, and use the _-version of the debugging macros:
#include "wine/debug.h" WINE_DEFAULT_DEBUG_CHANNEL(xxx); WINE_DECLARE_DEBUG_CHANNEL(yyy); WINE_DECLARE_DEBUG_CHANNEL(zzz); ... FIXME("this one goes to xxx channel"); ... FIXME_(yyy)("Some other msg for the yyy channel"); ... WARN_(zzz)("And yet another msg on another channel!"); ...

Are we debugging?
To test whether the debugging channel xxx is enabled, use the TRACE_ON, WARN_ON, FIXME_ON, or ERR_ON macros. For example:
if(TRACE_ON(atom)){ ...blah... }

You should normally need to test only if TRACE_ON, all the others are very seldomly used. With careful coding, you can avoid the use of these macros, which is generally desired.

Helper functions
Resource identiers can be either strings or numbers. To make life a bit easier for outputting these beasts (and to help you avoid the need to build the message in memory), I introduced a new function called debugres. The function is dened in wine/debug.h and has the following prototype:
LPSTR debugres(const void *id);

It takes a pointer to the resource id and returns a nicely formatted string of the identier (which can be a string or a number, depending on the value of the high word). Numbers are formatted as such:

Chapter 2. Debug Logging

#xxxx

while strings as:

some-string

Simply use it in your code like this:

#include "wine/debug.h" ... TRACE("resource is %s", debugres(myresource));

Many times strings need to be massaged before output: they may be NULL, contain control characters, or they may be too long. Similarly, Unicode strings need to be converted to ASCII for usage with the debugging API. For all this, you can use the debugstr_[aw]n? familly of functions:
HANDLE32 WINAPI YourFunc(LPCSTR s) { FIXME("(%s): stub\n", debugstr_a(s)); }

Controlling the debugging output

It is possible to turn on and off debugging output from within the debugger using the set command. Please see the WineDbg Command Reference section (the Section called Debug channels in Chapter 1) for how to do this. You can do the same using the task manager (taskmgr) and selecting your application in the application list. Right clicking on the application, and selecting the debug option in the popup menu, will let you select the modications you want on the debug channels. Another way to conditionally log debug output (e.g. in case of very large installers which may create gigabytes of log output) is to create a pipe:
$ mknod /tmp/debug_pipe p

and then to run wine like that:

$ WINEDEBUG=+relay,+snoop wine setup.exe &>/tmp/debug_pipe

Since the pipe is initially blocking (and thus wine as a whole), you have to activate it by doing:
$ cat /tmp/debug_pipe

(press Ctrl-C to stop pasting the pipe content) Once you are about to approach the problematic part of the program, you just do:
$ cat /tmp/debug_pipe >/tmp/wine.log

to capture specically the part that interests you from the pipe without wasting excessive amounts of HDD space and slowing down installation considerably.

Chapter 2. Debug Logging

The WINEDEBUG environment variable controls the output of the debug messages. It has the following syntax:
WINEDEBUG= [yyy]#xxx[,[yyy1]#xxx1]*

where # is either + or when the optional class argument (yyy) is not present, then the statement will enable(+)/disable(-) all messages for the given channel (xxx) on all classes. For example:
WINEDEBUG=+reg,-file

enables all messages on the reg channel and disables all messages on the file channel.

when the optional class argument (yyy) is present, then the statement will enable (+)/disable(-) messages for the given channel (xxx) only on the given class. For example:
WINEDEBUG=trace+reg,warn-file

enables trace messages on the reg channel and disables warning messages on the file channel.

also, the pseudo-channel all is also supported and it has the intuitive semantics:
WINEDEBUG=+all WINEDEBUG=-all WINEDEBUG=yyy+all WINEDEBUG=yyy-all -- enables all debug messages -- disables all debug messages -- enables debug messages for class yyy on all channels. -- disables debug messages for class yyy on all channels.

So, for example:

WINEDEBUG=warn-all -- disables all warning messages.

Also, note that at the moment:

the FIXME and ERR classes are enabled by default the TRACE and WARN classes are disabled by default

Compiling Out Debugging Messages

To compile out the debugging messages, provide congure with the following options:
--disable-debug --disable-trace -- turns off TRACE, WARN, and FIXME (and DUMP). -- turns off TRACE only.

This will result in an executable that, when stripped, is about 15%-20% smaller. Note, however, that you will not be able to effectively debug Wine without these messages. This feature has not been extensively tested--it may subtly break some things.

Chapter 2. Debug Logging

A Few Notes on Style

This new scheme makes certain things more consistent but there is still room for improvement by using a common style of debug messages. Before I continue, let me note that the output format is the following:
yyy:xxx:fff <message> where: yyy = the class (fixme, err, warn, trace) xxx = the channel (atom, win, font, etc) fff = the function name

these elds are output automatically. All you have to provide is the <message> part. So here are some ideas:

do not include the name of the function: it is included automatically if you want to output the parameters of the function, do it as the rst thing and include them in parentheses, like this:
TRACE("(%d, %p, ...)\n", par1, par2, ...);

if you want to name a parameter, use = :

TRACE("(fd=%d, file=%s): stub\n", fd, name);

for stubs, you should output a FIXME message. I suggest this style:
FIXME("(%x, %d, ...): stub\n", par1, par2, ...);

try to output one line per message. That is, the format string should contain only one \n and it should always appear at the end of the string. if the output string needs to be dynamically constructed, render it in memory before outputting it:
char buffer[128] = ""; if (flags & FLAG_A) strcat(buffer, "FLAG_A "); if (flags & FLAG_B) strcat(buffer, "FLAG_B "); if (flags & FLAG_C) strcat(buffer, "FLAG_C "); TRACE("flags = %s\n", buffer);

Most of the time however, it is better to create a helper function that renders to a temporary buffer:
static const char *dbgstr_flags(int flags) { char buffer[128] = ""; if (flags & FLAG_A) strcat(buffer, "FLAG_A "); if (flags & FLAG_B) strcat(buffer, "FLAG_B "); if (flags & FLAG_C) strcat(buffer, "FLAG_C "); return wine_dbg_sprintf("flags = %s\n\n", buffer); } ...

Chapter 2. Debug Logging

TRACE("flags = %s\n", dbgstr_flags(flags));

Chapter 3. Other debugging techniques

Understanding undocumented APIs
Some background: On the i386 class of machines, stack entries are usually dword (4 bytes) in size, little-endian. The stack grows downward in memory. The stack pointer, maintained in the esp register, points to the last valid entry; thus, the operation of pushing a value onto the stack involves decrementing esp and then moving the value into the memory pointed to by esp (i.e., push p in assembly resembles *(--esp) = p; in C). Removing (popping) values off the stack is the reverse (i.e., pop p corresponds to p = *(esp++); in C). In the stdcall calling convention, arguments are pushed onto the stack right-to-left. For example, the C call myfunction(40, 20, 70, 30); is expressed in Intel assembly as:
push push push push call 30 70 20 40 myfunction

The called function is responsible for removing the arguments off the stack. Thus, before the call to myfunction, the stack would look like:
[local variable or temporary] [local variable or temporary] 30 70 20 40

esp ->

After the call returns, it should look like:

esp -> [local variable or temporary] [local variable or temporary]

To restore the stack to this state, the called function must know how many arguments to remove (which is the number of arguments it takes). This is a problem if the function is undocumented. One way to attempt to document the number of arguments each function takes is to create a wrapper around that function that detects the stack offset. Essentially, each wrapper assumes that the function will take a large number of arguments. The wrapper copies each of these arguments into its stack, calls the actual function, and then calculates the number of arguments by checking esp before and after the call. The main problem with this scheme is that the function must actually be called from another program. Many of these functions are seldom used. An attempt was made to aggressively query each function in a given library (ntdll.dll) by passing 64 arguments, all 0, to each function. Unfortunately, Windows NT quickly goes to a blue screen of death, even if the program is run from a non-administrator account. Another method that has been much more successful is to attempt to gure out how many arguments each function is removing from the stack. This instruction, ret hhll (where hhll is the number of bytes to remove, i.e. the number of arguments times 4), contains the bytes 0xc2 ll hh in memory. It is a reasonable assumption that few, if any, functions take more than 16 arguments; therefore, simply searching for hh == 0 && ll < 0x40 starting from the address of a function yields the correct number of arguments most of the time.

Chapter 3. Other debugging techniques

Of course, this is not without errors. ret 00ll is not the only instruction that can have the byte sequence 0xc2 ll 0x0; for example, push 0x000040c2 has the byte sequence 0x68 0xc2 0x40 0x0 0x0, which matches the above. Properly, the utility should look for this sequence only on an instruction boundary; unfortunately, nding instruction boundaries on an i386 requires implementing a full disassembler -- quite a daunting task. Besides, the probability of having such a byte sequence that is not the actual return instruction is fairly low. Much more troublesome is the non-linear ow of a function. For example, consider the following two functions:
somefunction1: jmp somefunction1_impl somefunction2: ret 0004 somefunction1_impl: ret 0008

In this case, we would incorrectly detect both somefunction1 and somefunction2 as taking only a single argument, whereas somefunction1 really takes two arguments. With these limitations in mind, it is possible to implement more stubs in Wine and, eventually, the functions themselves.

How to do regression testing using Git

A problem that can happen sometimes is it used to work before, now it doesnt anymore.... Here is a step by step procedure to try to pinpoint when the problem occurred. This is NOT for casual users. 1. Clone the Git repository from winehq. Its more than 100Mb, so it may take some time with a slow Internet connection. 2. If you found that something broke between wine-1.1.42 and wine-1.1.44 (these are [WWW] release tags). To start regression testing we run:
git bisect start git bisect good wine-1.1.42 git bisect bad wine-1.1.44

If you have exact date/time instead of a release you will need to use sha1 IDs from git log.

3. Having told Git when things were working and when they broke, it will automatically "position" your source tree to the middle. So all you need to do is build the source:
./configure && make clean && make depend && make ./wine c:\test.exe

If the version of Wine that Git picked still has the bug, run:
git bisect bad

and if it does not, run:

git bisect good

Chapter 3. Other debugging techniques

When you run this command, Git will checkout a new version of Wine for you to rebuild, so repeat this step again. When the regression has been isolated, git will inform you. To nd out whats left to test, try:
git bisect visualize.

4. When you have found the bad patch and want to go back to the current HEAD run:
git bisect reset

5. If you nd the patch that is the cause of the problem, you have almost won; report about it to Wine Bugzilla (http://bugs.winehq.org/) or subscribe to wine-devel and post it there. There is a chance that the author will jump in to suggest a x; or there is always the possibility to look hard at the patch until it is coerced to reveal where is the bug :-)

Which code has been tested?

Deciding what code should be tested next can be a difcult decision. And in any given project, there is always code that isnt tested where bugs could be lurking. This section goes over how to identify these sections using a tool called gcov. To use gcov on wine, do the following: 1. In order to activate code coverage in the wine source code, when running make set CFLAGS like so make CFLAGS="-fprole-arcs -ftest-coverage". Note that this can be done at any directory level. Since compile and run time are signicantly increased by these ags, you may want to only use these ags inside a given dll directory. 2. Run any application or test suite. 3. Run gcov on the le which you would like to know more about code coverage. The following is an example situation when using gcov to determine the coverage of a le could be helpful. Well use the dlls/lzexpand/lzexpand_main.c. le. At one time the code in this le was not fully tested (as it may still be). For example at the time of this writing, the function LZOpenFileA had the following lines in it:
if ((mode&~0x70)!=OF_READ) return fd; if (fd==HFILE_ERROR) return HFILE_ERROR; cfd=LZInit(fd); if ((INT)cfd <= 0) return fd; return cfd;

Currently there are a few tests written to test this function; however, these tests dont check that everything is correct. For instance, HFILE_ERROR may be the wrong error code to return. Using gcov and directed tests, we can validate the correctness of this line of code. First, we see what has been tested already by running gcov on the le. To do this, do the following:
git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git wine mkdir build cd build

Chapter 3. Other debugging techniques

../wine/configure make depend && make CFLAGS="-fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage" cd dlls/lxexpand/tests make test cd .. gcov ../../../wine/dlls/lzexpand/lzexpand_main.c 0.00% of 3 lines executed in file ../../../wine/include/wine/unicode.h Creating unicode.h.gcov. 0.00% of 4 lines executed in file /usr/include/ctype.h Creating ctype.h.gcov. 0.00% of 6 lines executed in file /usr/include/bits/string2.h Creating string2.h.gcov. 100.00% of 3 lines executed in file ../../../wine/include/winbase.h Creating winbase.h.gcov. 50.83% of 240 lines executed in file ../../../wine/dlls/lzexpand/lzexpand_main.c Creating lzexpand_main.c.gcov. less lzexpand_main.c.gcov

Note that there is more output, but only output of gcov is shown. The output le lzexpand_main.c.gcov looks like this.
9: 6: 3: #####: 3: 3: 3: 545: 546: 547: 548: 549: 550: 551: if ((mode&~0x70)!=OF_READ) return fd; if (fd==HFILE_ERROR) return HFILE_ERROR; cfd=LZInit(fd); if ((INT)cfd <= 0) return fd; return cfd;

gcov output consists of three components: the number of times a line was run, the line number, and the actual text of the line. Note: If a line is optimized out by the compiler, it will appear as if it was never run. The line of code which returns HFILE_ERROR is never executed (and it is highly unlikely that it is optimized out), so we dont know if it is correct. In order to validate this line, there are two parts of this process. First we must write the test. Please see Chapter 5 to learn more about writing tests. We insert the following lines into a test case:
INT file; /* Check for nonexistent file. */ file = LZOpenFile("badfilename_", &test, OF_READ); ok(file == LZERROR_BADINHANDLE, "LZOpenFile succeeded on nonexistent file\n"); LZClose(file);

Once we add in this test case, we now want to know if the line in question is run by this test and works as expected. You should be in the same directory as you left off in the previous command example. The only difference is that we have to remove the *.da les in order to start the count over (if we leave the les than the number of times the line is run is just added, e.g. line 545 below would be run 19 times) and we remove the *.gcov les because they are out of date and need to be recreated.
rm *.da *.gcov cd tests make make test cd .. gcov ../../../wine/dlls/lzexpand/lzexpand_main.c 0.00% of 3 lines executed in file ../../../wine/include/wine/unicode.h

Chapter 3. Other debugging techniques

Creating unicode.h.gcov. 0.00% of 4 lines executed in file /usr/include/ctype.h Creating ctype.h.gcov. 0.00% of 6 lines executed in file /usr/include/bits/string2.h Creating string2.h.gcov. 100.00% of 3 lines executed in file ../../../wine/include/winbase.h Creating winbase.h.gcov. 51.67% of 240 lines executed in file ../../../wine/dlls/lzexpand/lzexpand_main.c Creating lzexpand_main.c.gcov. less lzexpand_main.c.gcov

Note that there is more output, but only output of gcov is shown. The output le lzexpand_main.c.gcov looks like this.
10: 6: 4: 1: 3: 3: 3: 545: 546: 547: 548: 549: 550: 551: if ((mode&~0x70)!=OF_READ) return fd; if (fd==HFILE_ERROR) return HFILE_ERROR; cfd=LZInit(fd); if ((INT)cfd <= 0) return fd; return cfd;

Based on gcov, we now know that HFILE_ERROR is returned once. And since all of our other tests have remain unchanged, we can assume that the one time it is returned is to satisfy the one case we added where we check for it. Thus we have validated a line of code. While this is a cursory example, it demostrates the potential usefulness of this tool. For a further in depth description of gcov, the ofcial gcc compiler suite page for gcov is http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.2.3/gcc/Gcov.html (http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.2.3/gcc/Gcov.html). There is also an excellent article written by Steve Best for Linux Magazine which describes and illustrates this process very well at http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-07/compile_01.html (http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-07/compile_01.html).

Chapter 4. Coding Practice

This chapter describes the relevant coding practices in Wine, that you should be aware of before doing any serious development in Wine.

Patch Format
Patches are submitted via email to the Wine patches mailing list, <[email protected]>. Your patch should include:

A meaningful subject (very short description of patch) A long (paragraph) description of what was wrong and what is now better. (recommended) A change log entry (short description of what was changed). The patch in Git format

To generate a patch using Git, rst commit it to your local tree. Each le that you change needs to be updated with git update . If you are adding or removing a le, use git update --add or git update --remove respectively. After updating the index, commit the change using git commit . The commit message will be sent with your patch, and recored in the ChangeLog. After committing the patch, you can extract it using git format-patch and send it to wine-patches using git imap-send or simply attaching it to you mail manually.

Some notes about style

There are a few conventions about coding style that have been adopted over the years of development. The rational for these rules is explained for each one.

No HTML mail, since patches should be in-lined and HTML turns the patch into garbage. Also it is considered bad etiquette as it uglies the message, and is not viewable by many of the subscribers. Only one change set per patch. Patches should address only one bug/problem at a time. If a lot of changes need to be made then it is preferred to break it into a series of patches. This makes it easier to nd regressions. Tabs are not forbidden but discouraged. A tab is dened as 8 characters and the usual amount of indentation is 4 characters. C++ style comments are discouraged since some compilers choke on them. Commenting out a block of code is usually done by enclosing it in #if 0 ... #endif Statements. For example.
/* note about reason for commenting block */ #if 0 code code /* comments */ code #endif

The reason for using this method is that it does not require that you edit comments that may be inside the block of code.

Chapter 4. Coding Practice

Patches should be in-lined (if you can congure your email client to not wrap lines), or attached as plain text attachments so they can be read inline. This may mean some more work for you. However it allows others to review your patch easily and decreases the chances of it being overlooked or forgotten. Code is usually limited to 80 columns. This helps prevent mailers mangling patches by line wrap. Also it generally makes code easier to read. If the patch xes a bug in Bugzilla please provide a link to the bug in the comments of the patch. This will make it easier for the maintainers of Bugzilla.

Inline attachments with Outlook Express

Outlook Express is notorious for mangling attachments. Giving the patch a .txt extension and attaching will solve the problem for most mailers including Outlook. Also, there is a way to enable Outlook Express to send .diff attachments. You need the following two things to make it work. 1. Make sure that .diff les have \r\n line ends, because if OE detects that there is no \r\n line endings it switches to quoted-printable format attachments. 2. Using regedit add key "Content Type" with value "text/plain" to the .diff extension under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (same as for .txt extension). This tells OE to use Content-Type: text/plain instead of application/octet-stream. Item #1 is important. After you hit the "Send" button, go to "Outbox" and using "Properties" verify the message source to make sure that the mail has the correct format. You might want to send several test emails to yourself too.

Alexandres Bottom Line

The basic rules are: no attachments, no MIME crap, no line wrapping, a single patch per mail. Basically if I cant do "cat raw_mail | patch -p0" its in the wrong format.

Quality Assurance
(Or, "How do I get Alexandre to apply my patch quickly so I can build on it and it will not go stale?") Make sure your patch applies to the current Git HEAD revisions. If a bunch of patches are committed that may affect whether your patch will apply cleanly then verify that your patch does apply! git fetch; git rebase origin is your friend! Save yourself some embarrassment and run your patched code against more than just your current test example. Experience will tell you how much effort to apply here. If there are any conformance tests for the code youre working on, run them and make sure they still pass after your patch is applied. Running tests can be done by running make test. You may need to run make testclean to undo the results of a previous test run. See the testing guide for more details on Wines conformance tests.

Porting Wine to new Platforms

This document provides a few tips on porting Wine to your favorite (UNIX-based) operating system.

Chapter 4. Coding Practice

Why ifdef MyOS is probably a mistake.

Operating systems change. Maybe yours doesnt have the foo.h header, but maybe a future version will have it. If you want to #include <foo.h>, it doesnt matter what operating system you are using; it only matters whether foo.h is there. Furthermore, operating systems change names or "fork" into several ones. An #ifdef MyOs will break over time. If you use the feature of autoconf -- the Gnu auto-conguration utility -- wisely, you will help future porters automatically because your changes will test for features, not names of operating systems. A feature can be many things:

existence of a header le existence of a library function existence of libraries bugs in header les, library functions, the compiler, ...

You will need Gnu Autoconf, which you can get from your friendly Gnu mirror. This program takes Wines configure.ac le and produces a configure shell script that users use to congure Wine to their system. There are exceptions to the "avoid #ifdef MyOS" rule. Wine, for example, needs the internals of the signal stack -that cannot easily be described in terms of features. Moreover, you cannot use autoconfs HAVE_* symbols in Wines headers, as these may be used by Winelib users who may not be using a configure script. Lets now turn to specic porting problems and how to solve them.

MyOS doesnt have the foo.h header!

This rst step is to make autoconf check for this header. In configure.in you add a segment like this in the section that checks for header les (search for "header les"):
AC_CHECK_HEADER(foo.h, AC_DEFINE(HAVE_FOO_H))

If your operating system supports a header le with the same contents but a different name, say bar.h, add a check for that also. Now you can change
#include <foo.h>

to
#ifdef HAVE_FOO_H #include <foo.h> #elif defined (HAVE_BAR_H) #include <bar.h> #endif

If your system doesnt have a corresponding header le even though it has the library functions being used, you might have to add an #else section to the conditional. Avoid this if you can. You will also need to add #undef HAVE_FOO_H (etc.) to include/config.h.in Finish up with make congure and ./congure.

Chapter 4. Coding Practice

MyOS doesnt have the bar function!

A typical example of this is the memmove function. To solve this problem you would add memmove to the list of functions that autoconf checks for. In configure.in you search for AC_CHECK_FUNCS and add memmove. (You will notice that someone already did this for this particular function.) Secondly, you will also need to add #undef HAVE_BAR to include/config.h.in The next step depends on the nature of the missing function. Case 1: Its easy to write a complete implementation of the function. (memmove belongs to this case.) You add your implementation in misc/port.c surrounded by #ifndef HAVE_MEMMOVE and #endif. You might have to add a prototype for your function. If so, include/miscemu.h might be the place. Dont forget to protect that denition by #ifndef HAVE_MEMMOVE and #endif also!

Case 2: A general implementation is hard, but Wine is only using a special case. An example is the various wait calls used in SIGNAL_child from loader/signal.c. Here we have a multi-branch case on features:
#ifdef HAVE_THIS ... #elif defined (HAVE_THAT) ... #elif defined (HAVE_SOMETHING_ELSE) ... #endif

Note that this is very different from testing on operating systems. If a new version of your operating systems comes out and adds a new function, this code will magically start using it.

Finish up with make congure and ./congure.

Adding New Languages

This le documents the necessary procedure for adding a new language to the list of languages that Wine can display system menus and forms in. Adding new translations is not hard as it requires no programming knowledge or special skills. Language dependent resources reside in les named somefile_Xx.rc or Xx.rc, where Xx is your language abbreviation (look for it in include/winnls.h). These are included in a master le named somefile.rc or rsrc.rc, located in the same directory as the language les. To add a new language to one of these resources you need to make a copy of the English resource (located in the somefile_En.rc le) over to your somefile_Xx.rc le, include this le in the master somefile.rc le, and edit the new le to translate the English text. You may also need to rearrange some of the controls to better t the newly translated strings. Test your changes to make sure they properly layout on the screen.

Chapter 4. Coding Practice

In menus, the character "&" means that the next character will be highlighted and that pressing that letter will select the item. You should place these "&" characters suitably for your language, not just copy the positions from English. In particular, items within one menu should have different highlighted letters. To get a list of the les that need translating, run the following command in the root of your Wine tree: nd -name "*En.rc". When adding a new language, also make sure the parameters dened in ./dlls/kernel/nls/*.nls t your local habits and language.

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

Introduction
The Windows API follows no standard, it is itself a de facto standard, and deviations from that standard, even small ones, often cause applications to crash or misbehave in some way. The question becomes, "How do we ensure compliance with that standard?" The answer is, "By using the API documentation available to us and backing that up with conformance tests." Furthermore, a conformance test suite is the most accurate (if not necessarily the most complete) form of API documentation and can be used to supplement the Windows API documentation. Writing a conformance test suite for more than 10000 APIs is no small undertaking. Fortunately it can prove very useful to the development of Wine way before it is complete.

The conformance test suite must run on Windows. This is necessary to provide a reasonable way to verify its accuracy. Furthermore the tests must pass successfully on all Windows platforms (tests not relevant to a given platform should be skipped). A consequence of this is that the test suite will provide a great way to detect variations in the API between different Windows versions. For instance, this can provide insights into the differences between the, often undocumented, Win9x and NT Windows families. However, one must remember that the goal of Wine is to run Windows applications on Linux, not to be a clone of any specic Windows version. So such variations must only be tested for when relevant to that goal.

Writing conformance tests is also an easy way to discover bugs in Wine. Of course, before xing the bugs discovered in this way, one must rst make sure that the new tests do pass successfully on at least the Wine Test Bot base VMs. Bugs discovered this way should also be easier to x. Unlike some mysterious application crashes, when a conformance test fails, the expected behavior and APIs tested for are known thus greatly simplifying the diagnosis.

To detect regressions. Simply running the test suite regularly in Wine turns it into a great tool to detect regressions. When a test fails, one immediately knows what was the expected behavior and which APIs are involved. Thus regressions caught this way should be detected earlier, because it is easy to run all tests on a regular basis, and be easier to x because of the reduced diagnosis work. Tests written in advance of the Wine development (possibly even by non Wine developers) can also simplify the work of the future implementer by making it easier for him to check the correctness of his code. Conformance tests will also come in handy when testing Wine on new (or not as widely used) architectures such as FreeBSD, Solaris x86 or even non-x86 systems. Even when the port does not involve any signicant change in the thread management, exception handling or other low-level aspects of Wine, new architectures can expose subtle bugs that can be hard to diagnose when debugging regular (complex) applications.

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

What to test for?

The rst thing to test for is the documented behavior of APIs and such as CreateFile. For instance one can create a le using a long pathname, check that the behavior is correct when the le already exists, try to open the le using the corresponding short pathname, convert the lename to Unicode and try to open it using CreateFileW, and all other things which are documented and that applications rely on. While the testing framework is not specically geared towards this type of tests, it is also possible to test the behavior of Windows messages. To do so, create a window, preferably a hidden one so that it does not steal the focus when running the tests, and send messages to that window or to controls in that window. Then, in the message procedure, check that you receive the expected messages and with the correct parameters. For instance you could create an edit control and use WM_SETTEXT to set its contents, possibly check length restrictions, and verify the results using WM_GETTEXT. Similarly one could create a listbox and check the effect of LB_DELETESTRING on the lists number of items, selected items list, highlighted item, etc. For concrete examples, see dlls/user32/tests/win.c and the related tests. However, undocumented behavior should not be tested for unless there is an application that relies on this behavior, and in that case the test should mention that application, or unless one can strongly expect applications to rely on this behavior, typically APIs that return the required buffer size when the buffer pointer is NULL.

Running the tests in Wine

The simplest way to run the tests in Wine is to type make test in the Wine sources top level directory. This will run all the Wine conformance tests. The tests for a specic Wine library are located in a tests directory in that librarys directory. Each test is contained in a le (e.g. dlls/kernel/tests/thread.c). Each le itself contains many checks concerning one or more related APIs. So to run all the tests related to a given Wine library, go to the corresponding tests directory and type make test. This will compile the tests, run them, and create an xxx .ok le for each test that passes successfully. And if you only want to run the tests contained in the thread.c le of the kernel library, you would do:
$ cd dlls/kernel/tests $ make thread.ok

Note that if the test has already been run and is up to date (i.e. if neither the kernel library nor the thread.c le has changed since the thread.ok le was created), then make will say so. To force the test to be re-run, delete the thread.ok le, and run the make command again. You can also run tests manually using a command similar to the following:
$ ../../../tools/runtest -q -M kernel32.dll -p kernel32_test.exe.so thread.c $ ../../../tools/runtest -P wine -p kernel32_test.exe.so thread.c

thread.c: 86 tests executed, 5 marked as todo, 0 failures.

The -P wine option denes the platform that is currently being tested and is used in conjunction with the todo statements (see below). Remove the -q option if you want the testing framework to report statistics about the number of successful and failed tests. Run runtest -h for more details.

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

Cross-compiling the tests with MinGW

Setup of the MinGW cross-compiling environment
Here are some instructions to setup MinGW on different Linux distributions and *BSD.

Debian GNU/Linux like deb systems

This includes Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, etc. The following step should probably work on any deb based system. Run apt-get install mingw32.

Red Hat Linux like rpm systems

This includes Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mandrake, most probably SuSE Linux too, etc. But this list isnt exhaustive; The following step should probably work on any rpm based system. Run yum install mingw32-gcc.

*BSD
The *BSD systems have in their ports collection a port for the MinGW cross-compiling environment. Please see the documentation of your system about how to build and install a port.

Compiling the tests

Having the cross-compiling environment set up the generation of the Windows executables is easy by using the Wine build system. If you had already run congure, then delete config.cache and re-run congure. You can then run make crosstest. To sum up:
$ rm config.cache $ ./configure $ make crosstest

Building and running the tests on Windows

Using pre-compiled binaries
The simplest solution is to visit test.winehq.org (http://test.winehq.org) and download the latest version of winetest at the bottom of the page. This executable contains all the Wine conformance tests, runs them and reports the results. You can also get the older versions from Paul Millars website (http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBuilt/).

With Visual C++

If you are using Visual Studio 6, make sure you have the "processor pack" from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/tools/ppack/default.aspx. The processor pack xes "error C2520:

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

conversion from unsigned __int64 to double not implemented, use signed __int64". However note that the "processor pack" is incompatible with Visual Studio 6.0 Standard Edition, and with the Visual Studio 6 Service Pack 6. If you are using Visual Studio 7 or greater you do not need the processor pack. In either case it is recommended to the most recent compatible Visual Studio service pack (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/updates/sp/). If are using Visual Studio Express and you need specic libraries like ntdll.lib that dont ship with Visual Studio Express, you will need the Windows Driver Development Kit (DDK) (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ddk/default.mspx) which is part of the Windows Developer Kit (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/resources/downloads.mspx).

get the Wine sources Run msvcmaker to generate Visual C++ project les for the tests. msvcmaker is a perl script so you may be able to run it on Windows.
$ ./tools/winapi/msvcmaker --no-wine

If the previous steps were done on your Linux development machine, make the Wine sources accessible to the Windows machine on which you are going to compile them. Typically you would do this using Samba but copying them altogether would work too. On the Windows machine, open the winetest.dsw workspace. This will load each tests project. For each test there are two congurations: one compiles the test with the Wine headers, and the other uses the Microsoft headers. If you choose the "Win32 MSVC Headers" conguration, most of the tests will not compile with the regular Visual Studio headers. So to use this conguration, download and install a recent Platform SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/) as well as the latest DirectX SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/downloads/list/directx.asp). Then, congure Visual Studio (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/ENUS/sdkintro/sdkintro/installing_the_platform_sdk_with_visual_studio.asp) to use these SDKs headers and libraries. Alternately you could go to the Project+Settings... menu and modify the settings appropriately, but you would then have to redo this whenever you rerun msvcmaker. Open the Build+Batch build... menu and select the tests and build congurations you want to build. Then click on Build. To run a specic test from Visual C++, go to Project+Settings.... There select that tests project and build conguration and go to the Debug tab. There type the name of the specic test to run (e.g. thread) in the Program arguments eld. Validate your change by clicking on Ok and start the test by clicking the red exclamation mark (or hitting F5 or any other usual method). You can also run the tests from the command line. You will nd them in either Output\Win32_Wine_Headers or Output\Win32_MSVC_Headers depending on the build method. So to run the kernel path tests you would do:
C:\>cd dlls\kernel\tests\Output\Win32_MSVC_Headers C:\wine\dlls\kernel\tests\Output\Win32_MSVC_Headers> kernel32_test path

With MinGW
Wines build system already has support for building tests with a MinGW cross-compiler. See the section above called Setup of the MinGW cross-compiling environment for instructions on how to set things up. When you have a MinGW environment installed all you need to do is rerun congure and it should detect the MinGW compiler and tools. Then run make crosstest to start building the tests.

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

Standalone, using the Microsoft C++ Toolkit

Sometimes its nice to be able to build a new unit test on Windows without Wine, and without buying Microsoft Visual C++. Heres the simplest way to do that on a Windows system:

Download and install the free-as-in-beer Microsoft C++ Toolkit (http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003) and the Microsoft Platform SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate). Make a directory wine underneath your work directory, and copy the le wine/test.h from the Wine source tree there. (You can download this le from the latest revision at http://source.winehq.org/git/?p=wine.git;a=blob_plain;f=include/wine/test.h (http://source.winehq.org/git/?p=wine.git;a=blob_plain;f=include/wine/test.h)). Copy some existing test from the Wine source tree, or create your test program (say, mytest.c) using Notepad, being sure to begin it with #include <wine/test.h> following the usual Wine test style. Finally, in a command prompt window, compile the test with the command
C:\your\work\dir>cl -I. -DSTANDALONE -D_X86_ mytest.c

Once thats working, try running the program under Wine without recompiling it. See? No Wine source required at all, save for that one header, wine/test.h. If you want to use the Microsoft C++ Toolkit under Wine, install it under Windows, then copy it to your fake C drive; itll work ne there. See CL Howto (http://kegel.com/wine/cl-howto.html) for some tips on making it easy to use from the Linux commandline.

Inside a test
When writing new checks you can either modify an existing test le or add a new one. If your tests are related to the tests performed by an existing le, then add them to that le. Otherwise create a new .c le in the tests directory and add that le to the CTESTS variable in Makefile.in. A new test le will look something like the following:
#include <wine/test.h> #include <winbase.h> /* Maybe auxiliary functions and definitions here */ START_TEST(paths) { /* Write your checks there or put them in functions you will call from * there */ }

The tests entry point is the START_TEST section. This is where execution will start. You can put all your tests in that section but it may be better to split related checks in functions you will call from the START_TEST section. The parameter to START_TEST must match the name of the C le. So in the above example the C le would be called paths.c.

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

Tests should start by including the wine/test.h header. This header will provide you access to all the testing framework functions. You can then include the windows header you need, but make sure to not include any Unix or Wine specic header: tests must compile on Windows. You can use trace to print informational messages. Note that these messages will only be printed if runtest -v is being used.
trace("testing GlobalAddAtomA\n"); trace("foo=%d\n",foo);

Then just call functions and use ok to make sure that they behaved as expected:
ATOM atom = GlobalAddAtomA( "foobar" ); ok( GlobalFindAtomA( "foobar" ) == atom, "could not find atom foobar\n" ); ok( GlobalFindAtomA( "FOOBAR" ) == atom, "could not find atom FOOBAR\n" );

The rst parameter of ok is an expression which must evaluate to true if the test was successful. The next parameter is a printf-compatible format string which is displayed in case the test failed, and the following optional parameters depend on the format string.

Writing good error messages

The message that is printed when a test fails is extremely important. Someone will take your test, run it on a Windows platform that you dont have access to, and discover that it fails. They will then post an email with the output of the test, and in particular your error message. Someone, maybe you, will then have to gure out from this error message why the test failed. If the error message contains all the relevant information that will be easy. If not, then it will require modifying the test, nding someone to compile it on Windows, sending the modied version to the original tester and waiting for his reply. In other words, it will be long and painful. So how do you write a good error message? Lets start with an example of a bad error message:
ok(GetThreadPriorityBoost(curthread,&disabled)!=0, "GetThreadPriorityBoost Failed\n");

This will yield:

thread.c:123: Test failed: GetThreadPriorityBoost Failed

Did you notice how the error message provides no information about why the test failed? We already know from the line number exactly which test failed. In fact the error message gives strictly no information that cannot already be obtained by reading the code. In other words it provides no more information than an empty string! Lets look at how to rewrite it:
BOOL rc; ... rc=GetThreadPriorityBoost(curthread,&disabled); ok(rc!=0 && disabled==0,"rc=%d error=%ld disabled=%d\n", rc,GetLastError(),disabled);

This will yield:

thread.c:123: Test failed: rc=0 error=120 disabled=0

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

When receiving such a message, one would check the source, see that its a call to GetThreadPriorityBoost, that the test failed not because the API returned the wrong value, but because it returned an error code. Furthermore we see that GetLastError() returned 120 which winerror.h denes as ERROR_CALL_NOT_IMPLEMENTED. So the source of the problem is obvious: this Windows platform (here Windows 98) does not support this API and thus the test must be modied to detect such a condition and skip the test. So a good error message should provide all the information which cannot be obtained by reading the source, typically the function return value, error codes, and any function output parameter. Even if more information is needed to fully understand a problem, systematically providing the above is easy and will help cut down the number of iterations required to get to a resolution. It may also be a good idea to dump items that may be hard to retrieve from the source, like the expected value in a test if it is the result of an earlier computation, or comes from a large array of test values (e.g. index 112 of _pTestStrA in vartest.c). In that respect, for some tests you may want to dene a macro such as the following:

#define eq(received, expected, label, type) \ ok((received) == (expected), "%s: got " type " instead of " type "\n", (label),(received), ... eq( b, curr_val, "SPI_{GET,SET}BEEP", "%d" );

Handling platform issues

Some checks may be written before they pass successfully in Wine. Without some mechanism, such checks would potentially generate hundred of known failures for months each time the tests are being run. This would make it hard to detect new failures caused by a regression. or to detect that a patch xed a long standing issue. Thus the Wine testing framework has the concept of platforms and groups of checks can be declared as expected to fail on some of them. In the most common case, one would declare a group of tests as expected to fail in Wine. To do so, use the following construct:
todo_wine { SetLastError( 0xdeadbeef ); ok( GlobalAddAtomA(0) == 0 && GetLastError() == 0xdeadbeef, "failed to add atom 0\n" ); }

On Windows the above check would be performed normally, but on Wine it would be expected to fail, and not cause the failure of the whole test. However. If that check were to succeed in Wine, it would cause the test to fail, thus making it easy to detect when something has changed that xes a bug. Also note that todo checks are accounted separately from regular checks so that the testing statistics remain meaningful. When writing tests you will also encounter differences between Windows 9x and Windows NT platforms. Such differences should be treated differently from the platform issues mentioned above. In particular you should remember that the goal of Wine is not to be a clone of any specic Windows version but to run Windows applications on Unix. So, if an API returns a different error code on Windows 9x and Windows NT, your check should just verify that Wine returns one or the other:
ok ( GetLastError() == WIN9X_ERROR || GetLastError() == NT_ERROR, ...);

If an API is only present on some Windows platforms, then use LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress to check if it is implemented and invoke it. Remember, tests must run on all Windows platforms. Similarly, conformance tests should nor try to correlate the Windows version returned by GetVersion with whether given APIs are implemented or not.

Chapter 5. Writing Conformance tests

Again, the goal of Wine is to run Windows applications (which do not do such checks), and not be a clone of a specic Windows version.

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

This chapter describes how you can help improve Wines documentation. Like most large scale volunteer projects, Wine is strongest in areas that are rewarding for its volunteers to work in. The majority of contributors send code patches either xing bugs, adding new functionality or otherwise improving the software components of the distribution. A lesser number contribute in other ways, such as reporting bugs and regressions, creating tests, providing organizational assistance, or helping to document Wine. Documentation is important for many reasons, and is often the key to the end user having a successful experience in installing, setting up and using software. Because Wine is a complicated, evolving entity, providing quality up to date documentation is vital to encourage more people to persevere with using and contributing to the project. The following sections describe in detail how to go about adding to or updating Wines existing documentation.

An Overview Of Wine Documentation

The Wine source code tree comes with a large amount of documentation in the documentation/ subdirectory. This used to be a collection of text les culled from various places such as the Wine Weekly News and the wine-devel mailing list, but was reorganized some time ago into a number of books, each of which is marked up using SGML. You are reading one of these books (the Wine Developers Guide) right now. Since being reorganized, the books have been updated and extended regularly. In their current state they provide a good framework which over time can be expanded and kept up to date. This means that most of the time when further documentation is added, it is a simple matter of updating the content of an already existing le. The books available at the time of writing are:

The Wine User Guide. This book contains information for end users on installing, conguring and running Wine. The Wine Developers Guide. This book contains information and guidelines for developers and contributors to the Wine project. The Winelib Users Guide. This book contains information for developers using Winelib to port Win32 applications to Unix. The Wine Packagers Guide. This book contains information for anyone who will be distributing Wine to end users in a prepackaged format. It is also the exception to the rule as it has intentionally been kept in text format. The Wine FAQ. This book contains frequently asked questions about Wine with their answers.

To obtain a copy of the Wine documentation refer to the Documentation Git tree (http://source.winehq.org/git/docs.git/). Another source of documentation is the Wine API Guide. This is generated information taken from special comments placed in the Wine source code. When you update or add new API calls to Wine you should consider documenting them so that developers can determine what the API does and how it should be used. The next sections describe how to create Wine API documentation and how to work with SGML so you can add to the existing books.

Writing Wine API Documentation

Introduction to API Documentation
Wine includes a large amount of documentation on the API functions it implements. There are several reasons to

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

want to document the Win32 API:

To allow Wine developers to know what each function should do, should they need to update or x it. To allow Winelib users to understand the functions that are available to their applications. To provide an alternative source of free documentation on the Win32 API. To provide more accurate documentation where the existing documentation is accidentally or deliberately vague or misleading.

To this end, a semi formalized way of producing documentation from the Wine source code has evolved. Since the primary users of API documentation are Wine developers themselves, documentation is usually inserted into the source code in the form of comments and notes. Good things to include in the documentation of a function include:

The purpose of the function. The parameters of the function and their purpose. The return value of the function, in success as well as failure cases. Additional notes such as interaction with other parts of the system, differences between Wines implementation and Win32s, errors in MSDN documentation, undocumented cases and bugs that Wine corrects or is compatible with.

Good documentation helps developers be aware of the effects of making changes. It also allows good tests to be written which cover all of the documented cases. Note that you do not need to be a programmer to update the documentation in Wine. If you would like to contribute to the project, patches that improve the API documentation are welcome. The following describes how to format any documentation that you write so that the Wine documentation generator can extract it and make it available to other developers and users. In general, if you did not write the function in question, you should be wary of adding comments to other peoples code. It is quite possible you may misunderstand or misrepresent what the original author intended! Adding API documentation on the other hand can be done by anybody, since in most cases there is plenty of information about what a function is supposed to do (if it isnt obvious) available in books and articles on the internet. A nal warning concerns copyright and must be noted. If you read MSDN or any publication in order to nd out what an API call does, you must be aware that the text you are reading is copyrighted and in most cases cannot legally be reproduced without the authors permission. If you copy verbatim any information from such sources and submit it for inclusion into Wine, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. You must ensure that anything you submit is your own work, although it can be based on your understanding gleaned from reading other peoples work.

Basic API Documentation

The general form of an API comment in Wine is a block comment immediately before a function is implemented in the source code. General comments within a function body or at the top of an implementation le are ignored by the API documentation generator. Such comments are for the benet of developers only, for example to explain what the source code is doing or to describe something that may not be obvious to the person reading the source code. The following text uses the function PathRelativePathToA() from SHLWAPI.DLL as an example. You can nd this function in the Wine source code tree in the le dlls/shlwapi/path.c. The rst line of the comment gives the name of the function, the DLL that the function is exported from, and its export ordinal number. This is the simplest (and most common type of) comment:

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

/************************************************************************* [SHLWAPI.@] * PathRelativePathToW */

The functions name and the DLL name are obvious. The ordinal number takes one of two forms: Either @ as in the above, or a number if the export is exported by ordinal. You can see which to use by looking at the DLLs .spec le. If the line on which the function is listed begins with a number, use it, otherwise use the @ symbol, which indicates that this function is imported only by name. Note also that round or square brackets can be used, and whitespace between the name and the DLL/ordinal is free form. Thus the following is equally valid:
/************************************************************************* * PathRelativePathToW (SHLWAPI.@) */

This basic comment will not get processed into documentation, since it contains no information. In order to produce documentation for the function, We must add some of the information listed above. First we add a description of the function. This can be as long as you like, but typically contains only a brief description of what the function is meant to do in general terms. It is free form text:
/************************************************************************* [SHLWAPI.@] * PathRelativePathToW * * Create a relative path from one path to another. */

To be truly useful however we must document the parameters to the function. There are two methods for doing this: In the comment, or in the function prototype. Parameters documented in the comment should be formatted as follows:
/************************************************************************* [SHLWAPI.@] * PathRelativePathToW * * Create a relative path from one path to another. * * PARAMS [O] Destination for relative path * lpszPath lpszFrom [I] Source path * * dwAttrFrom [I] File attribute of source path [I] Destination path * lpszTo [I] File attributes of destination path * dwAttrTo * */

The parameters section starts with PARAMS on its own line. Each parameter is listed in the order they appear in the functions prototype, rst with the parameters name, followed by its input/output status, followed by a free form text description of the comment. The input/output status tells the programmer whether the value will be modied by the function (an output parameter), or only read (an input parameter). The status must be enclosed in square brackets to be recognized, otherwise, or if it is absent, anything following the parameter name is treated as the parameter description. This eld is case insensitive and can be any of the following: [I], [In], [O], [Out], [I/O], [In/Out].

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Following the description and parameters come a number of optional sections, all in the same format. A section is dened as the section name, which is an all upper case section name on its own line, followed by free form text. You can create any sections you like, however for consistency it is recommended you use the following section names: 1. NOTES. Anything that needs to be noted about the function such as special cases and the effects of input arguments. 2. BUGS. Any bugs in the function that exist by design, i.e. those that will not be xed or exist for compatibility with Windows. 3. TODO. Any unhandled cases or missing functionality in the Wine implementation of the function. 4. FIXME. Things that should be updated or addressed in the implementation of the function at some future date (perhaps dependent on other parts of Wine). Note that if this information is only relevant to Wine developers then it should probably be placed in the relevant code section instead.

Following or before the optional sections comes the RETURNS section which describes the return value of the function. This is free form text but should include what is returned on success as well as possible error return codes. Note that this section must be present for documentation to be generated for your comment. Our nal documentation looks like the following:
/************************************************************************* [SHLWAPI.@] * PathRelativePathToW * * Create a relative path from one path to another. * * PARAMS [O] Destination for relative path * lpszPath [I] Source path * lpszFrom * dwAttrFrom [I] File attribute of source path [I] Destination path * lpszTo [I] File attributes of destination path * dwAttrTo * * RETURNS * TRUE If a relative path can be formed. lpszPath contains the new path * FALSE If the paths are not relative or any parameters are invalid * * NOTES * lpszTo should be at least MAX_PATH in length. * Calling this function with relative paths for lpszFrom or lpszTo may * give erroneous results. * * The Win32 version of this function contains a bug where the lpszTo string * may be referenced 1 byte beyond the end of the string. As a result random * garbage may be written to the output path, depending on what lies beyond * the last byte of the string. This bug occurs because of the behaviour of * PathCommonPrefix() (see notes for that function), and no workaround seems * possible with Win32. * This bug has been fixed here, so for example the relative path from "\\" * to "\\" is correctly determined as "." in this implementation. */

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

Advanced API Documentation

There is no markup language for formatting API comments, since they should be easily readable by any developer working on the source le. A number of constructs are treated specially however, and are noted here. You can use these constructs to enhance the usefulness of the generated documentation by making it easier to read and referencing related documents. Any valid c identier that ends with () is taken to be an API function and is formatted accordingly. When generating documentation, this text will become a link to that API call, if the output type supports hyperlinks or their equivalent. Similarly, any interface name starting with a capital I and followed by the words "reference" or "object" become a link to that objects documentation. Where an Ascii and Unicode version of a function are available, it is recommended that you document only the Unicode version and have the Ascii version refer to the Unicode one, as follows:
/************************************************************************* [SHLWAPI.@] * PathRelativePathToA * * See PathRelativePathToW. */

Alternately you may use the following form:

/************************************************************************* [SHLWAPI.@] * PathRelativePathToA * * Unicode version of PathRelativePathToW. */

You may also use this construct in any other section, such as NOTES. Any numbers and text in quotes ("") are highlighted. Words in all uppercase are assumed to be API constants and are highlighted. If you want to emphasize something in the documentation, put it in a section by itself rather than making it upper case. Blank lines in a section cause a new paragraph to be started. Blank lines at the start and end of sections are ignored. Any comment line starting with ("*|") is treated as raw text and is not pre-processed before being output. This should be used for code listings, tables and any text that should remain unformatted. Any line starting with a single word followed by a colon (:) is assumed to be case listing and is emphasized and put in its own paragraph. This is most often used for return values, as in the example section below.
* RETURNS * Success: TRUE. Something happens that is documented here. * Failure: FALSE. The reasons why this call can fail are listed here.

Any line starting with a (-) is put into a paragraph by itself. this allows lists to avoid being run together. If you are in doubt as to how your comment will look, try generating the API documentation and checking the output.

Extra API Documentation

Simply documenting the API calls available provides a great deal of information to developers working with the Win32 API. However additional documentation is needed before the API Guide can be considered truly useful or comprehensive. For example, COM objects that are available for developers use should be documented, along with

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

the interface(s) that those objects export. Also, it would be helpful to document each dll, to provide some structure to the documentation. To facilitate providing extra documentation, you can create comments that provide extra documentation on functions, or on keywords such as the name of a COM interface or a type denition. These items are generated using the same formatting rules as described earlier. The only difference is the rst line of the comment, which indicates to the generator that the documentation is supplemental and does not describe an export from the dll being processed. Lets assume you have implemented a COM interface that you want to document; well use the name IExample as an example here. Your comment would look like the following (assuming you are exporting this object from EXAMPLE.DLL):
/************************************************************************* {EXAMPLE} * IExample * * The IExample object provides lots of interesting functionality. * ... */

Format this documentation exactly as you would a standard export. The only difference is the use of curly brackets to mark this documentation as supplemental. The generator will output this documentation using the name given before the DLL name, and will link to it from the main DLL page. In addition, if you have referred to the comment name in other documentation using "IExample interface", "IExample object", or "IExample()", those references will point to this documentation. If you document you COM interfaces this way then all following extra comments that follow in the same source le that begin with the same document title will be added as references to this comment before it is output. For an example of this see dlls/oleaut32/safearray.c. This uses an extra comment to document The SafeArray functions and link them together under one heading. As a special case, if you use the DLL name as the comment name, the comment will be treated as documentation on the DLL itself. When the documentation for the DLL is processed, the contents of the comment will be placed before the generated statistics, exports and other information that makes up a DLLs documentation page.

Generating API Documentation

Having edited or added new API documentation to a source code le, you should generate the documentation to ensure that the result is what you expected. Wine includes a tool (slightly misleadingly) called c2man.pl in the tools/ directory which is used to generate the documentation from the source code. You can run c2man.pl manually for testing purposes; it is a fairly simple perl script which parses .c les to create output in several formats. If you wish to try this you may want to run it with no arguments, which will cause it to print usage information. An easier way is to use Wines build system. To create man pages for a given dll, just type make man from within the dlls directory or type make manpages in the root directory of the Wine source tree. You can then check that a man page was generated for your function, it should be present in the documentation/man3w directory with the same name as the function. Once you have generated the man pages from the source code, running make install will install them for you. By default they are installed in section 3w of the manual, so they dont conict with any existing man page names. So, to read the man page you should use man -S 3w {name}. Alternately you can edit /etc/man.config and add 3w to the list of search paths given in the variable MANSECT .

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

You can also generate HTML output for the API documentation, in this case the make command is make doc-html in the dll directory, or make htmlpages from the root. The output will be placed by default under documentation/html. Similarly you can create SGML source code to produce the Wine Api Guide with the command make sgmlpages.

The Wine DocBook System

Writing Documentation with DocBook
DocBook is a avour of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), a syntax for marking up the contents of documents. HTML is another very common avour of SGML; DocBook markup looks very similar to HTML markup, although the names of the markup tags differ.

Getting Started
Why SGML?: The simple answer to that is that SGML allows you to create multiple formats of a given document from a single source. Currently it is used to create HTML, PDF, PS (PostScript) and Text versions of the Wine books.

What do I need?: You need the SGML tools. There are various places where you can get them. The most generic way of getting them is from their source as discussed below.

Quick instructions: These are the basic steps to create the Wine books from the SGML source.

1. Go to http://www.sgmltools.org 2. Download all of the sgmltools packages 3. Install them all and build them (./congure; make; make install) 4. Switch to your toplevel wine-docs directory 5. Run ./congure 6. run make html 7. View en/wineusr-guide.html, en/winedev-guide.html, etc. in your favorite browser For more information on building the documentation, please see the README le at the toplevel wine-docs directory.

Getting SGML for various distributions

Most Linux distributions have everything you need already bundled up in package form. Unfortunately, each distribution seems to handle its SGML environment differently, installing it into different paths, and naming its packages according to its own whims. SGML on Red Hat The following packages seem to be sufcient for Red Hat 7.1. You will want to be careful about the order in which you install the RPMs.

sgml-common-*.rpm

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openjade-.rpm perl-SGMLSpm-.rpm docbook-dtd.rpm docbook-style-dsssl-.rpm tetex-.rpm jadetex-.rpm docbook-utils-*.rpm

You can also use ghostscript to view the ps format output and Adobe Acrobat 4 to view the pdf le. SGML on Debian This is not a denitive list yet, but it seems you might need the following packages:

docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-utils docbook-xml docbook-xsl sgml-base sgml-data tetex-base tetex-bin jade jadetex

Terminology
SGML markup contains a number of syntactical elements that serve different purposes in the markup. Well run through the basics here to make sure were on the same page when we refer to SGML semantics. The basic currency of SGML is the tag. A simple tag consists of a pair of angle brackets and the name of the tag. For example, the para tag would appear in an SGML document as <para>. This start tag indicates that the immediately following text should be classied according to the tag. In regular SGML, each opening tag must have a matching end tag to show where the start tags contents end. End tags begin with </ markup, e.g., </para>. The combination of a start tag, contents, and an end tag is called an element. SGML elements can be nested inside of each other, or contain only text, or may be a combination of both text and other elements, although in most cases it is better to limit your elements to one or the other. The XML (eXtensible Markup Language) specication, a modern subset of the SGML specication, adds a so-called empty tag, for elements that contain no text content. The entire element is a single tag, ending with />, e.g., <xref/>. However, use of this tag style restricts you to XML DocBook processing, and your document may no longer compile with SGML-only processing systems. Often a processing system will need more information about an element than you can provide with just tags. SGML allows you to add extra hints in the form of SGML attributes to pass along this information. The most common use

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

of attributes in DocBook is giving specic elements a name, or an ID, so you can refer to it from elsewhere. This ID can be used for many things, including le-naming for HTML output, hyper-linking to specic parts of the document, and even pulling text from that element (see the <xref> tag). An SGML attribute appears inside the start tag, between the < and > brackets. For example, if you wanted to set the id attribute of the <book> element to mybook, you would create a start tag like this:
<book id="mybook">

Notice that the contents of the attribute are enclosed in quote marks. These quotes are optional in SGML, but mandatory in XML. Its a good habit to use quotes, as it will make it much easier to migrate your documents to an XML processing system later on. You can also specify more than one attribute in a single tag:
<book id="mybook" status="draft">

Another commonly used type of SGML markup is the entity. An entity lets you associate a block of text with a name. You declare the entity once, at the beginning of your document, and can invoke it as many times as you like throughout the document. You can use entities as shorthand, or to make it easier to maintain certain phrases in a central location, or even to insert the contents of an entire le into your document. An entity in your document is always surrounded by the & and ; characters. One entity youll need sooner or later is the one for the < character. Since SGML expects all tags to begin with a <, the < is a reserved character. To use it in your document (as I am doing here), you must insert it with the < entity. Each time the SGML processor encounters <, it will place a literal < in the output document. Similarly you must use the > and & entities for the > and & characters. The nal term youll need to know when writing simple DocBook documents is the DTD (Document Type Declaration). The DTD denes the avour of SGML a given document is written in. It lists all the legal tag names, like <book>, <para>, and so on, and declares how those tags are allowed to be used together. For example, it doesnt make sense to put a <book> element inside a <para> paragraph element -- only the reverse makes sense. The DTD thus denes the legal structure of the document. It also declares which attributes can be used with which tags. The SGML processing system can use the DTD to make sure the document is laid out properly before attempting to process it. SGML-aware text editors like Emacs can also use the DTD to guide you while you write, offering you choices about which tags you can add in different places in the document, and beeping at you when you try to add a tag where it doesnt belong. Generally, you will declare which DTD you want to use as the rst line of your SGML document. In the case of DocBook, you will use something like this:
<!doctype book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN" []> <book> ... </book>

Note that you must specify your toplevel element inside the doctype declaration. If you were writing an article rather than a book, you might use this declaration instead:
<!doctype article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN" []> <article> ... </article>

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

The Document
Once youre comfortable with SGML, creating a DocBook document is quite simple and straightforward. Even though DocBook contains over 300 different tags, you can usually get by with only a small subset of those tags. Most of them are for inline formatting, rather than for document structuring. Furthermore, the common tags have short, intuitive names. Below is a (completely nonsensical) example to illustrate how a simple document might be laid out. Notice that all <chapter> and <sect1> elements have id attributes. This is not mandatory, but is a good habit to get into, as DocBook is commonly converted into HTML, with a separate generated le for each <book>, <chapter>, and/or <sect1> element. If the given element has an id attribute, the processor will typically name the le accordingly. Thus, the below document might result in index.html, chapter-one.html, blobs.html, and so on. Also notice the text marked off with  characters. These denote SGML comments. SGML processors will completely ignore anything between these markers, similar to /* and */ comments in C source code.
<!doctype book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN" []> <book id="index"> <bookinfo> <title>A Poets Guide to Nonsense</title> </bookinfo> <chapter id="chapter-one"> <title>Blobs and Gribbles</title>  <sect1 id="blobs"> <title>The Story Behind Blobs</title> <para> Blobs are often mistaken for ice cubes and rain puddles... </para> </sect1>  <sect1 id="gribbles"> <title>Your Friend the Gribble</title> <para> A Gribble is a cute, unassuming little fellow... </para> <sect2 id="gribble-temperament"> <title>Gribble Temperament</title> <para> When left without food for several days... </para> </sect2> <sect2 id="gribble-appearance"> <title>Gribble Appearance</title> <para> Most Gribbles have a shock of white fur running from... </para> </sect2> </sect1> </chapter>

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<chapter id="chapter-two"> <title>Phantasmagoria</title> <sect1 id="dretch-pools"> <title>Dretch Pools</title> <para> When most poets think of Dretch Pools, they tend to... </para> </sect> </chapter> </book>

Common Elements
Once you get used to the syntax of SGML, the next hurdle in writing DocBook documentation is to learn the many DocBook-specic tag names, and when to use them. DocBook was created for technical documentation, and as such, the tag names and document structure are slanted towards the needs of such documentation. To cover its target audience, DocBook declares a wide variety of specialized tags, including tags for formatting source code (with somewhat of a C/C++ bias), computer prompts, GUI application features, keystrokes, and so on. DocBook also includes tags for universal formatting needs, like headers, footnotes, tables, and graphics. We wont cover all of these elements here (over 300 DocBook tags exist!), but we will cover the basics. To learn more about the other tags, check out the ofcial DocBook guide, at http://docbook.org. To see how they are used in practice, download the SGML source for this manual (the Wine Developer Guide) and browse through it, comparing it to the generated HTML (or PostScript or PDF). There are often many correct ways to mark up a given piece of text, and you may have to make guesses about which tag to use. Sometimes youll have to make compromises. However, remember that it is possible to further customize the output of the SGML processors. If you dont like the way a certain tag looks in HTML, that doesnt mean you should choose a different tag based on its output formatting. The processing stylesheets can be altered to x the formatting of that same tag everywhere in the document (not just in the place youre working on). For example, if youre frustrated that the <systemitem> tag doesnt produce any formatting by default, you should x the stylesheets, not change the valid <systemitem> tag to, for example, an <emphasis> tag. Here are the common SGML elements:

Structural Elements
<book>

The book is the most common toplevel element, and is probably the one you should use for your document.
<set>

If you want to group more than one book into a single unit, you can place them all inside a set. This is useful when you want to bundle up documentation in alternate ways. We do this with the Wine documentation, using <book> to put each Wine guide into a separate directory (see documentation/wine-devel.sgml, etc.).
<chapter>

A <chapter> element includes a single entire chapter of the book.

<part>

If the chapters in your book fall into major categories or groupings (as in the Wine Developer Guide), you can place each collection of chapters into a <part> element.

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<sect?>

DocBook has many section elements to divide the contents of a chapter into smaller chunks. The encouraged approach is to use the numbered section tags, <sect1>, <sect2>, <sect3>, <sect4>, and <sect5> (if necessary). These tags must be nested in order: you cant place a <sect3> directly inside a <sect1>. You have to nest the <sect3> inside a <sect2>, and so forth. Documents with these explicit section groupings are easier for SGML processors to deal with, and lead to better organized documents. DocBook also supplies a <section> element which you can nest inside itself, but its use is discouraged in favor of the numbered section tags.
<title>

The title of a book, chapter, part, section, etc. In most of the major structural elements, like <chapter>, <part>, and the various section tags, <title> is mandatory. In other elements like <book> and <note>, its optional.
<para>

The basic unit of text is the paragraph, represented by the <para> tag. This is probably the tag youll use most often. In fact, in a simple document, you can probably get away with using only <book>, <chapter>, <title>, and <para>.
<article>

For shorter, more targeted documents, like topic pieces and whitepapers, you can use <article> as your toplevel element.

Inline Formatting Elements

The name of a le. You can optionally set the class attribute to Directory, HeaderFile, and SymLink to further classify the lename.
<userinput>

Literal text entered by the user.

Literal text output by the computer.

A catch-all element for literal computer data. Its use is somewhat vague; try to use a more specic tag if possible, like <userinput> or <computeroutput>.
<quote>

An inline quotation. This tag typically inserts quotation marks for you, so you would write <quote>This is a quote</quote> rather than "This is a quote". This usage may be a little bulkier, but it does allow for automated formatting of all quoted material in the document. Thus, if you wanted all quotations to appear in italic, you could make the change once in your stylesheet, rather than doing a search and replace throughout the document. For larger chunks of quoted text, you can use <blockquote>.
<note>

Insert a side note for the reader. By default, the SGML processor usually prexes the content with "Note:". You can change this text by adding a <title> element. Thus, to add a visible FIXME comment to the documentation, you might write:
<note> <title>EXAMPLE</title> <para>This is an example note...</para>

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</note>

The results will look something like this:

EXAMPLE: This is an example note...

Used for inserting SGML tags, etc., into a SGML document without resorting to a lot of entity quoting, e.g., <. You can change the appearance of the text with the class attribute. Some common values of this are starttag, endtag, attribute, attvalue, and even sgmlcomment. See this SGML le, documentation/documentation.sgml, for examples.
<prompt>

The text used for a computer prompt, for example a shell prompt, or command-line application prompt.
<replaceable>

Meta-text that should be replaced by the user, not typed in literally, e.g., in command descriptions and --help outputs.
<constant>

A programming constant, e.g., MAX_PATH.

A symbolic value replaced, for example, by a pre-processor. This applies primarily to C macros, but may have other uses. Use the <constant> tag instead of <symbol> where appropriate.
<function>

A programming function name.

Programming language parameters you pass with a function.

Parameters you pass to a command-line executable.

Variable name, typically in a programming language.

<type>

Programming language types, e.g., from a typedef denition. May have other uses, too.
<structname>

The name of a C-language struct declaration, e.g., sockaddr.

A eld inside a C struct.

An executable binary, e.g., wine or ls.

<envar>

An environment variable, e.g, $PATH.

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

A generic catch-all for system-related things, like OS names, computer names, system resources, etc.
<email>

An email address. The SGML processor will typically add extra formatting characters, and even a mailto: link for HTML pages. Usage: <email>[email protected]</email>
<firstterm>

Special emphasis for introducing a new term. Can also be linked to a <glossary> entry, if desired.

Item Listing Elements

For bulleted lists, no numbering. You can tweak the layout with SGML attributes.
<orderedlist>

A numbered list; the SGML processor will insert the numbers for you. You can suggest numbering styles with the numeration attribute.
<simplelist>

A very simple list of items, often inlined. Control the layout with the type attribute.
<variablelist>

A list of terms with denitions or descriptions, like this very list!

Block Text Quoting Elements

Quote a block of source code. Typically highlighted in the output and set off from normal text.
<screen>

Quote a block of visible computer output, like the output of a command or chunks of debug logs.

Hyperlink Elements
<link>

Generic hypertext link, used for pointing to other sections within the current document. You supply the visible text for the link, plus the name of the id attribute of the element that you want to link to. For example:
<link linkend="configuring-wine">the section on configuring wine</link> ... <sect2 id="configuring-wine"> ... <xref>

In-document hyperlink that can generate its own text. Similar to the <link> tag, you use the linkend attribute to specify which target element you want to jump to:
<xref linkend="configuring-wine"> ... <sect2 id="configuring-wine"> ...

Chapter 6. Documenting Wine

By default, most SGML processors will auto generate some generic text for the <xref> link, like Section 2.3.1. You can use the endterm attribute to grab the visible text content of the hyperlink from another element:
<xref linkend="configuring-wine" endterm="config-title"> ... <sect2 id="configuring-wine"> <title id="config-title">Configuring Wine</title> ...

This would create a link to the conguring-wine element, displaying the text of the cong-title element for the hyperlink. Most often, youll add an id attribute to the <title> of the section youre linking to, as above, in which case the SGML processor will use the targets title text for the link text. Alternatively, you can use an xreflabel attribute in the target element tag to specify the link text:
<sect1 id="configuring-wine" xreflabel="Configuring Wine"> Note: <xref> is an empty element. You dont need a closing tag for it (this is dened in the DTD). In SGML documents, you should use the form <xref>, while in XML documents you should use <xref/>.

An invisible tag, used for inserting id attributes into a document to link to arbitrary places (i.e., when its not close enough to link to the top of an element).
<ulink>

Hyperlink in URL form, e.g., http://www.winehq.org.

<olink>

Indirect hyperlink; can be used for linking to external documents. Not often used in practice.

Editing SGML Documents

You can write SGML/DocBook documents in any text editor you might nd although some editors are more friendly for this task than others. The most commonly used open source SGML editor is Emacs, with the PSGML mode, or extension. Emacs does not supply a GUI or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface, but it does provide many helpful shortcuts for creating SGML, as well as automatic formatting, validity checking, and the ability to create your own macros to simplify complex, repetitive actions.

II. Wine Architecture

Chapter 7. Overview
Brief overview of Wines architecture...

Wine Overview
Foreword
Wine is often used as a recursive acronym, standing for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". Sometimes it is also known to be used for "Windows Emulator". In a way, both meanings are correct, only seen from different perspectives. The rst meaning says that Wine is not a virtual machine, it does not emulate a CPU, and you are not supposed to install Windows nor any Windows device drivers on top of it; rather, Wine is an implementation of the Windows API, and can be used as a library to port Windows applications to Unix. The second meaning, obviously, is that to Windows binaries (.exe les), Wine does look like Windows, and emulates its behaviour and quirks rather closely.
"Emulator": The "Emulator" perspective should not be thought of as if Wine is a typical inefcient emulation layer that means Wine cant be anything but slow - the faithfulness to the badly designed Windows API may of course impose a minor overhead in some cases, but this is both balanced out by the higher efciency of the Unix platforms Wine runs on, and that other possible abstraction libraries (like Motif, GTK+, CORBA, etc) has a runtime overhead typically comparable to Wines.

Executables
Wines main task is to run Windows executables under non Windows operating systems. It supports different types of executables:

DOS executable. Those are even older programs, using the DOS format (either .com or .exe (the later being also called MZ)). Windows NE executable, also called 16 bit. They were the native processes run by Windows 2.x and 3.x. NE stands for New Executable <g>. Windows PE executable. These are programs were introduced in Windows 95 (and became the native formats for all later Windows version), even if 16 bit applications were still supported. PE stands for Portable Executable, in a sense where the format of the executable (as a le) is independent of the CPU (even if the content of the le - the code - is CPU dependent). Winelib executable. These are applications, written using the Windows API, but compiled as a Unix executable. Wine provides the tools to create such executables.

Lets quickly review the main differences for the supported executables: Table 7-1. Wine executables DOS (.COM or .EXE) Multitasking Win16 (NE) Win32 (PE) Preemptive Win64 (PE) Preemptive Winelib Preemptive

Only one application Cooperative at a time (except for TSR)

Chapter 7. Overview

DOS (.COM or .EXE) Address space One MB of memory, where each application is loaded and unloaded. No Windows API but the DOS API (like Int 21h traps). Only available on x86 in real mode. Code and data are in segmented forms, with 16 bit offsets. Processor is in real mode.

Win16 (NE) All 16 bit applications share a single address space, protected mode. Will call the 16 bit Windows API.

Win32 (PE) Each application has its own address space. Requires MMU support from CPU. Will call the 32 bit Windows API.

Win64 (PE) Each application has its own address space. Requires MMU support from CPU. Will call the 64 bit Windows API.

Winelib

Each applicat has its own address space Requires MM support from CPU.

Windows API

Will call the 32/64 bit Windows API and possibly a the Unix APIs

Code (CPU level)

Only available on IA-32 architectures, code and data are in segmented forms, with 16 bit offsets (hence the 16 bit name). Processor is in protected mode. Not available.

Available (with NT) on several CPUs, including IA-32. On this CPU, uses a at memory model with 32 bit offsets (hence the 32 bit name). Available.

Only available on AMD64 architectures.

Flat model, w 32 bit address

Multi-threading

Not available.

Available.

Available, bu must use the Win32/64 AP for threading a synchronizatio not the Unix ones.

Wine deals with this issue by launching a separate Wine process (which is in fact a Unix process) for each Win32 process, but not for Win16 tasks. Win16 tasks are run as different intersynchronized Unix-threads in the same dedicated Wine process; this Wine process is commonly known as a WOW process (Windows on Windows), referring to a similar mechanism used by Windows NT. Synchronization between the Win16 tasks running in the WOW process is normally done through the Win16 mutex whenever one of them is running, it holds the Win16 mutex, keeping the others from running. When the task wishes to let the other tasks run, the thread releases the Win16 mutex, and one of the waiting threads will then acquire it and let its task run. winevdm is the Wine process dedicated to running the Win16 processes. Note that several instances of this process could exist, as Windows has support for different VDM (Virtual Dos Machines) in order to have Win16 processes running in different address spaces. Wine also uses the same architecture to run DOS programs (in this case, the DOS emulation is provided by a Wine only DLL called winedos.

Chapter 7. Overview

Standard Windows Architectures

Windows 9x architecture
The windows architecture (Win 9x way) looks like this:
+---------------------+ | Windows EXE | +---------------------+ +---------+ | Windows | | DLL | +---------+ +---------+ | Windows | | DLL | +---------+ \ \ \ } core system DLLs / / / \ } kernel space / \ \ drivers (kernel space) / / \ } application / \ \ application & system DLLs / /

+---------+ +---------+ | GDI32 | | USER32 | | DLL | | DLL | +---------+ +---------+ +---------------------+ | Kernel32 DLL | +---------------------+ +---------------------+ | Win9x kernel | +---------------------+ +---------------------+ | Windows low-level | | drivers | +---------------------+

Windows NT architecture
The windows architecture (Windows NT way) looks like the following drawing. Note the new DLL (NTDLL) which allows implementing different subsystems (as win32); kernel32 in NT architecture implements the Win32 subsystem on top of NTDLL.
+---------------------+ | Windows EXE | +---------------------+ +---------+ | Windows | | DLL | +---------+ +---------+ | Windows | | DLL | +---------+ +-----------+ | | | | | | | | | Subsystem | \ \ \ \ core system DLLs / (on the left side) / \ } application / \ \ application & system DLLs / /

+---------+ +---------+ | GDI32 | | USER32 | | DLL | | DLL | +---------+ +---------+ +---------------------+ | Kernel32 DLL |

Chapter 7. Overview

| (Win32 subsystem) | +---------------------+

|Posix, OS/2| +-----------+

/ /

+---------------------------------------+ | NTDLL.DLL | +---------------------------------------+ +---------------------------------------+ | NT kernel | +---------------------------------------+ +---------------------------------------+ | Windows low-level drivers | +---------------------------------------+ \ } NT kernel (kernel space) / \ } drivers (kernel space) /

Note also (not depicted in schema above) that the 16 bit applications are supported in a specic subsystem. Some basic differences between the Win9x and the NT architectures include:

Several subsystems (Win32, Posix...) can be run on NT, while not on Win 9x Win 9x roots its architecture in 16 bit systems, while NT is truly a 32 bit system. The drivers model and interfaces in Win 9x and NT are different (even if Microsoft tried to bridge the gap with some support of WDM drivers in Win 98 and above).

Wine architecture
Global picture
Wine implementation is closer to the Windows NT architecture, even if several subsystems are not implemented yet (remind also that 16bit support is implemented in a 32-bit Windows EXE, not as a subsystem). Heres the overall picture:
+---------------------+ | Windows EXE | +---------------------+ +---------+ | Windows | | DLL | +---------+ +---------+ | Windows | | DLL | +---------+ +-----------+ | | | | | | | | | Subsystem | |Posix, OS/2| +-----------+ +--------+ | | | Wine | | Server | | | | NT-like| | Kernel | | | | | | | \ \ \ \ core system DLLs / (on the left side) / / / \ } application / \ \ application & system DLLs / /

+---------+ +---------+ | GDI32 | | USER32 | | DLL | | DLL | +---------+ +---------+ +---------------------+ | Kernel32 DLL | | (Win32 subsystem) | +---------------------+

+---------------------------------------+

Chapter 7. Overview

| NTDLL | +---------------------------------------+

| | +--------+ \ } unix executable / \ } Wine specific DLLs / \ / } unix shared libraries (user space)

+---------------------------------------+ | Wine executable (wine-?thread) | +---------------------------------------+ +---------------------------------------------------+ | Wine drivers | +---------------------------------------------------+ +------------+ | libc | +------------+ +------------+ | libX11 | +------------+ +--------------+ | other libs | +--------------+

+---------------------------------------------------+ | Unix kernel (Linux,*BSD,Solaris,OS/X) | +---------------------------------------------------+ +---------------------------------------------------+ | Unix device drivers | +---------------------------------------------------+

\ } (Unix) kernel space / \ } Unix drivers (kernel space) /

Wine must at least completely replace the "Big Three" DLLs (KERNEL/KERNEL32, GDI/GDI32, and USER/USER32), which all other DLLs are layered on top of. But since Wine is (for various reasons) leaning towards the NT way of implementing things, the NTDLL is another core DLL to be implemented in Wine, and many KERNEL32 and ADVAPI32 features will be implemented through the NTDLL. As of today, no real subsystem (apart the Win32 one) has been implemented in Wine. The Wine server provides the backbone for the implementation of the core DLLs. It mainly implementents inter-process synchronization and object sharing. It can be seen, from a functional point of view, as a NT kernel (even if the APIs and protocols used between Wines DLL and the Wine server are Wine specic). Wine uses the Unix drivers to access the various hardware pieces on the box. However, in some cases, Wine will provide a driver (in Windows sense) to a physical hardware device. This driver will be a proxy to the Unix driver (this is the case, for example, for the graphical part with X11 or SDL drivers, audio with OSS or ALSA drivers...). All DLLs provided by Wine try to stick as much as possible to the exported APIs from the Windows platforms. There are rare cases where this is not the case, and have been propertly documented (Wine DLLs export some Wine specic APIs). Usually, those are prexed with __wine. Lets now review in greater details all of those components.

The Wine server

The Wine server is among the most confusing concepts in Wine. What is its function in Wine? Well, to be brief, it provides Inter-Process Communication (IPC), synchronization, and process/thread management. When the Wine server launches, it creates a Unix socket for the current host based on (see below) your home directorys .wine subdirectory (or wherever the WINEPREFIX environment variable points to) - all Wine processes launched later connects to the Wine server using this socket. If a Wine server was not already running, the rst Wine process will start up the Wine server in auto-terminate mode (i.e. the Wine server will then terminate itself once the last Wine process has terminated). In earlier versions of Wine the master socket mentioned above was actually created in the conguration directory; either your home directorys /wine subdirectory or wherever the WINEPREFIX environment variable points>. Since that might not be possible the socket is actually created within the /tmp directory with a name that reects the

Chapter 7. Overview

conguration directory. This means that there can actually be several separate copies of the Wine server running; one per combination of user and conguration directory. Note that you should not have several users using the same conguration directory at the same time; they will have different copies of the Wine server running and this could well lead to problems with the registry information that they are sharing. Every thread in each Wine process has its own request buffer, which is shared with the Wine server. When a thread needs to synchronize or communicate with any other thread or process, it lls out its request buffer, then writes a command code through the socket. The Wine server handles the command as appropriate, while the client thread waits for a reply. In some cases, like with the various WaitFor??? synchronization primitives, the server handles it by marking the client thread as waiting and does not send it a reply before the wait condition has been satised. The Wine server itself is a single and separate Unix process and does not have its own threading - instead, it is built on top of a large poll() loop that alerts the Wine server whenever anything happens, such as a client having sent a command, or a wait condition having been satised. There is thus no danger of race conditions inside the Wine server itself - it is often called upon to do operations that look completely atomic to its clients. Because the Wine server needs to manage processes, threads, shared handles, synchronization, and any related issues, all the clients Win32 objects are also managed by the Wine server, and the clients must send requests to the Wine server whenever they need to know any Win32 object handles associated Unix le descriptor (in which case the Wine server duplicates the le descriptor, transmits it back to the client, and leaves it to the client to close the duplicate when the client has nished with it).

Wine builtin DLLs: about Relays, Thunks, and DLL descriptors

This section mainly applies to builtin DLLs (DLLs provided by Wine). See section the Section called Wine/Windows DLLs for the details on native vs. builtin DLL handling. Loading a Windows binary into memory isnt that hard by itself, the hard part is all those various DLLs and entry points it imports and expects to be there and function as expected; this is, obviously, what the entire Wine implementation is all about. Wine contains a range of DLL implementations. You can nd the DLLs implementation in the dlls/ directory. Each DLL (at least, the 32 bit version, see below) is implemented in a Unix shared library. The le name of this shared library is the module name of the DLL with a .dll.so sufx (or .drv.so or any other relevant extension depending on the DLL type). This shared library contains the code itself for the DLL, as well as some more information, as the DLL resources and a Wine specic DLL descriptor. The DLL descriptor, when the DLL is instanciated, is used to create an in-memory PE header, which will provide access to various information about the DLL, including but not limited to its entry point, its resources, its sections, its debug information... The DLL descriptor and entry point table is generated by the winebuild tool (previously just named build), taking DLL specication les with the extension .spec as input. Resources (after compilation by wrc) or message tables (after compilation by wmc) are also added to the descriptor by winebuild. Once an application module wants to import a DLL, Wine will look:

through its list of registered DLLs (in fact, both the already loaded DLLs, and the already loaded shared libraries which has registered a DLL descriptor). Since, the DLL descriptor is automatically registered when the shared library is loaded - remember, registration call is put inside a shared library constructor. If its not registered, Wine will look for it on disk, building the shared library name from the DLL module name. Directory searched for are specied by the WINEDLLPATH environment variable. Failing that, it will look for a real Windows .DLL le to use, and look through its imports, etc) and use the loading of native DLLs.

Chapter 7. Overview

After the DLL has been identied (assuming its still a native one), its mapped into memory using a dlopen() call. Note, that Wine doesnt use the shared library mechanisms for resolving and/or importing functions between two shared libraries (for two DLLs). The shared library is only used for providing a way to load a piece of code on demand. This piece of code, thanks the DLL descriptor, will provide the same type of information a native DLL would. Wine can then use the same code for native and builtin DLL to handle imports/exports. Wine also relies on the dynamic loading features of the Unix shared libraries to relocate the DLLs if needed (the same DLL can be loaded at different address in two different processes, and even in two consecutive run of the same executable if the order of loading the DLLs differ). The DLL descriptor is registered in the Wine realm using some tricks. The winebuild tool, while creating the code for DLL descriptor, also creates a constructor, that will be called when the shared library is loaded into memory. This constructor will actually register the descriptor to the Wine DLL loader. Hence, before the dlopen call returns, the DLL descriptor will be known and registered. This also helps to deal with the cases where theres still dependencies (at the ELF shared lib level, not at the embedded DLL level) between different shared libraries: the embedded DLLs will be properly registered, and even loaded (from a Windows point of view). Since Wine is 32-bit code itself, and if the compiler supports Windows calling convention, stdcall (gcc does), Wine can resolve imports into Win32 code by substituting the addresses of the Wine handlers directly without any thunking layer in between. This eliminates the overhead most people associate with "emulation", and is what the applications expect anyway. However, if the user specied WINEDEBUG=+relay , a thunk layer is inserted between the application imports and the Wine handlers (actually the export table of the DLL is modied, and a thunk is inserted in the table); this layer is known as "relay" because all it does is print out the arguments/return values (by using the argument lists in the DLL descriptors entry point table), then pass the call on, but its invaluable for debugging misbehaving calls into Wine code. A similar mechanism also exists between Windows DLLs - Wine can optionally insert thunk layers between them, by using WINEDEBUG=+snoop, but since no DLL descriptor information exists for non-Wine DLLs, this is less reliable and may lead to crashes. For Win16 code, there is no way around thunking - Wine needs to relay between 16-bit and 32-bit code. These thunks switch between the apps 16-bit stack and Wines 32-bit stack, copies and converts arguments as appropriate (an int is 16 bit 16-bit and 32 bits in 32-bit, pointers are segmented in 16 bit (and also near or far) but are 32 bit linear values in 32 bit), and handles the Win16 mutex. Some ner control can be obtained on the conversion, see winebuild reference manual for the details. Sufce to say that the kind of intricate stack content juggling this results in, is not exactly suitable study material for beginners. A DLL descriptor is also created for every 16 bit DLL. However, this DLL normally paired with a 32 bit DLL. Either, its the 16 bit counterpart of the 16 bit DLL (KRNL386.EXE for KERNEL32, USER for USER32...), or a 16 bit DLL directly linked to a 32 bit DLL (like SYSTEM for KERNEL32, or DDEML for USER32). In those cases, the 16 bit descriptor(s) is (are) inserted in the same shared library as the the corresponding 32 bit DLL. Wine will also create symbolic links between kernel32.dll.so and system.dll.so so that loading of either KERNEL32.DLL or SYSTEM.DLL will end up on the same shared library.

Wine/Windows DLLs
This document mainly deals with the status of current DLL support by Wine. Winecfg currently supports settings to change the load order of DLLs. The load order depends on several issues, which results in different settings for various DLLs.

Pros of Native DLLs

Native DLLs of course guarantee 100% compatibility for routines they implement. For example, using the native USER DLL would maintain a virtually perfect and Windows 95-like look for window borders, dialog controls, and so on. Using the built-in Wine version of this library, on the other hand, would produce a display that does not precisely

Chapter 7. Overview

mimic that of Windows 95. Such subtle differences can be engendered in other important DLLs, such as the common controls library COMMCTRL or the common dialogs library COMMDLG, when built-in Wine DLLs outrank other types in load order. More signicant, less aesthetically-oriented problems can result if the built-in Wine version of the SHELL DLL is loaded before the native version of this library. SHELL contains routines such as those used by installer utilities to create desktop shortcuts. Some installers might fail when using Wines built-in SHELL.

Cons of Native DLLs

Not every application performs better under native DLLs. If a library tries to access features of the rest of the system that are not fully implemented in Wine, the native DLL might work much worse than the corresponding built-in one, if at all. For example, the native Windows GDI library must be paired with a Windows display driver, which of course is not present under Intel Unix and Wine. Finally, occasionally built-in Wine DLLs implement more features than the corresponding native Windows DLLs. Probably the most important example of such behavior is the integration of Wine with X provided by Wines built-in USER DLL. Should the native Windows USER library take load-order precedence, such features as the ability to use the clipboard or drag-and-drop between Wine windows and X windows will be lost.

Deciding Between Native and Built-In DLLs

Clearly, there is no one rule-of-thumb regarding which load-order to use. So, you must become familiar with what specic DLLs do and which other DLLs or features a given library interacts with, and use this information to make a case-by-case decision.

Load Order for DLLs

The default load order follows this algorithm: for all DLLs which have a fully-functional Wine implementation, or where the native DLL is known not to work, the built-in library will be loaded rst. In all other cases, the native DLL takes load-order precedence. See The Wine User Guide (http://www.winehq.org/docs/wineusr-guide/) for informations on how to change the settings.

Memory management
Every Win32 process in Wine has its own dedicated native process on the host system, and therefore its own address space. This section explores the layout of the Windows address space and how it is emulated. Firstly, a quick recap of how virtual memory works. Physical memory in RAM chips is split into frames, and the memory that each process sees is split into pages. Each process has its own 4 gigabytes of address space (4gig being the maximum space addressable with a 32 bit pointer). Pages can be mapped or unmapped: attempts to access an unmapped page cause an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION which has the easily recognizable code of 0xC0000005. Any page can be mapped to any frame, therefore you can have multiple addresses which actually "contain" the same memory. Pages can also be mapped to things like les or swap space, in which case accessing that page will cause a disk access to read the contents into a free frame.

Initial layout (in Windows)

When a Win32 process starts, it does not have a clear address space to use as it pleases. Many pages are already mapped by the operating system. In particular, the EXE le itself and any DLLs it needs are mapped into memory, and space has been reserved for the stack and a couple of heaps (zones used to allocate memory to the app from). Some of these things need to be at a xed address, and others can be placed anywhere.

Chapter 7. Overview

The EXE le itself is usually mapped at address 0x400000 and up: indeed, most EXEs have their relocation records stripped which means they must be loaded at their base address and cannot be loaded at any other address. DLLs are internally much the same as EXE les but they have relocation records, which means that they can be mapped at any address in the address space. Remember we are not dealing with physical memory here, but rather virtual memory which is different for each process. Therefore OLEAUT32.DLL may be loaded at one address in one process, and a totally different one in another. Ensuring all the functions loaded into memory can nd each other is the job of the Windows dynamic linker, which is a part of NTDLL. So, we have the EXE and its DLLs mapped into memory. Two other very important regions also exist: the stack and the process heap. The process heap is simply the equivalent of the libc malloc arena on UNIX: its a region of memory managed by the OS which malloc/HeapAlloc partitions and hands out to the application. Windows applications can create several heaps but the process heap always exists. Windows 9x also implements another kind of heap: the shared heap. The shared heap is unusual in that anything allocated from it will be visible in every other process.

Comparison
So far weve assumed the entire 4 gigs of address space is available for the application. In fact thats not so: only the lower 2 gigs are available, the upper 2 gigs are on Windows NT used by the operating system and hold the kernel (from 0x80000000). Why is the kernel mapped into every address space? Mostly for performance: while its possible to give the kernel its own address space too - this is what Ingo Molnars 4G/4G VM split patch does for Linux - it requires that every system call into the kernel switches address space. As that is a fairly expensive operation (requires ushing the translation lookaside buffers etc) and syscalls are made frequently its best avoided by keeping the kernel mapped at a constant position in every processes address space. Basically, the comparison of memory mappings looks as follows: Table 7-2. Memory layout (Windows and Wine) Address 00000000-7fffffff 80000000-bfffffff c0000000-ffffffff Windows 9x User Shared Kernel Windows NT User User Kernel Linux User User Kernel

On Windows 9x, in fact only the upper gigabyte (0xC0000000 and up) is used by the kernel, the region from 2 to 3 gigs is a shared area used for loading system DLLs and for le mappings. The bottom 2 gigs on both NT and 9x are available for the programs memory allocation and stack.

Wine drivers
Wine will not allow running native Windows drivers under Unix. This comes mainly because (look at the generic architecture schemas) Wine doesnt implement the kernel features of Windows (kernel here really means the kernel, not the KERNEL32 DLL), but rather sets up a proxy layer on top of the Unix kernel to provide the NTDLL and KERNEL32 features. This means that Wine doesnt provide the inner infrastructure to run native drivers, either from the Win9x family or from the NT family. In other words, Wine will only be able to provide access to a specic device, if and only if, 1/ this device is supported in Unix (there is Unix-driver to talk to it), 2/ Wine has implemented the proxy code to make the glue between the API of a Windows driver, and the Unix interface of the Unix driver. Wine, however, tries to implement in the various DLLs needing to access devices to do it through the standard

Chapter 7. Overview

Windows APIs for device drivers in user space. This is for example the case for the multimedia drivers, where Wine loads Wine builtin DLLs to talk to the OSS interface, or the ALSA interface. Those DLLs implement the same interface as any user space audio driver in Windows.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

This section covers the kernel modules. As already stated, Wine implements the NT architecture, hence provides NTDLL for the core kernel functions, and KERNEL32, which is the implementation of the basis of the Win32 subsystem, on top of NTDLL. This chapter is made of two types of material (depending of their point of view). Some items will be tackled from a global point of view and then, when needed, explaining the split of work between NTDLL and KERNEL32; some others will be tackled from a DLL point of view (NTDLL or KERNEL32). The choice is made so that the output is more readable and understantable. At least, thats the intend (sigh).

The Wine initialization process

Wine has a rather complex startup procedure, so unlike many programs the best place to begin exploring the code-base is not in fact at the main() function but instead at some of the more straightforward DLLs that exist on the periphery such as MSI, the widget library (in USER and COMCTL32) etc. The purpose of this section is to document and explain how Wine starts up from the moment the user runs "wine myprogram.exe" to the point at which myprogram gets control.

First Steps
The actual wine binary that the user runs does not do very much, in fact it is only responsible for checking the threading model in use (NPTL vs LinuxThreads) and then invoking a new binary which performs the next stage in the startup sequence. See the beginning of this chapter for more information on this check and why its necessary. You can nd this code in loader/glibc.c. The result of this check is an exec of either wine-pthread or wine-kthread, potentially (on Linux) via the preloader. We need to use separate binaries here because overriding the native pthreads library requires us to exploit a property of ELF symbol xup semantics: its not possible to do this without starting a new process. The Wine preloader is found in loader/preloader.c, and is required in order to impose a Win32 style address space layout upon the newly created Win32 process. The details of what this does is covered in the address space layout chapter. The preloader is a statically linked ELF binary which is passed the name of the actual Wine binary to run (either wine-kthread or wine-pthread) along with the arguments the user passed in from the command line. The preloader is an unusual program: it does not have a main() function. In standard ELF applications, the entry point is actually at a symbol named _start(): this is provided by the standard gcc infrastructure and normally jumps to __libc_start_main() which initializes glibc before passing control to the main function as dened by the programmer. The preloader takes control direct from the entry point for a few reasons. Firstly, it is required that glibc is not initialized twice: the result of such behaviour is undened and subject to change without notice. Secondly, its possible that as part of initializing glibc, the address space layout could be changed - for instance, any call to malloc() will initialize a heap arena which modies the VM mappings. Finally, glibc does not return to _start() at any point, so by reusing it we avoid the need to recreate the ELF bootstrap stack (env, argv, auxiliary array etc). The preloader is responsible for two things: protecting important regions of the address space so the dynamic linker does not map shared libraries into them, and once that is done loading the real Wine binary off disk, linking it and starting it up. Normally all this is automatically by glibc and the kernel but as we intercepted this process by using a static binary its up to us to restart the process. The bulk of the code in the preloader is about loading wine-[pk]thread and ld-linux.so.2 off disk, linking them together, then starting the dynamic linking process. One of the last things the preloader does before jumping into the dynamic linker is scan the symbol table of the loaded Wine binary and set the value of a global variable directly: this is a more efcient way of passing information to the main Wine program than attening the data structures into an environment variable or command line parameter then unpacking it on the other side, but it achieves pretty much the same thing. The global variable set

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

points to the preload descriptor table, which contains the VMA regions protected by the preloader. This allows Wine to unmap them once the dynamic linker has been run, so leaving gaps we can initialize properly later on.

Starting the emulator

The process of starting up the emulator itself is mostly one of chaining through various initializer functions dened in the core libraries and DLLs: libwine, then NTDLL, then KERNEL32. Both the wine-pthread and wine-kthread binaries share a common main() function, dened in loader/main.c, so no matter which binary is selected after the preloader has run we start here. This passes the information provided by the preloader into libwine and then calls wine_init(), dened in libs/wine/loader.c. This is where the emulation really starts: wine_init() can, with the correct preparation, be called from programs other than the wine loader itself.
wine_init() does some very basic setup tasks such as initializing the debugging infrastructure, yet more address space manipulation (see the information on the 4G/4G VM split in the address space chapter), before loading NTDLL - the core of both Wine and the Windows NT series - and jumping to the __wine_process_init() function dened in dlls/ntdll/loader.c

This function is responsible for initializing the primary Win32 environment. In thread_init(), it sets up the TEB, the wineserver connection for the main thread and the process heap. See the beginning of this chapter for more information on this. Finally, it loads and jumps to __wine_kernel_init() in KERNEL32.DLL: this is dened in dlls/kernel32/process.c. This is where the bulk of the work is done. The KERNEL32 initialization code retrieves the startup info for the process from the server, initializes the registry, sets up the drive mapping system and locale data, then begins loading the requested application itself. Each process has a STARTUPINFO block that can be passed into CreateProcess specifying various things like how the rst window should be displayed: this is sent to the new process via the wineserver. After determining the type of le given to Wine by the user (a Win32 EXE le, a Win16 EXE, a Winelib app etc), the program is loaded into memory (which may involve loading and initializing other DLLs, the bulk of Wines startup code), before control reaches the end of __wine_kernel_init(). This function ends with the new process stack being initialized, and start_process being called on the new stack. Nearly there! The nal element of initializing Wine is starting the newly loaded program itself. start_process() sets up the SEH backstop handler, calls LdrInitializeThunk() which performs the last part of the process initialization (such as performing relocations and calling the DllMain() with PROCESS_ATTACH), grabs the entry point of the executable and then on this line:
ExitProcess( entry( peb ) );

... jumps to the entry point of the program. At this point the users program is running and the API provided by Wine is ready to be used. When entry returns, the ExitProcess() API will be used to initialize a graceful shutdown.

Detailed memory management

As already explained in previous chapter (see the Section called Memory management in Chapter 7 for the details), Wine creates every 32-bit Windows process in its own 32 address space. Wine also tries to map at the relevant addresses what Windows would do. There are however a few nasty bits to look at.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Implementation
Wine (with a bit of black magic) is able to map the main module at its desired address (likely 0x400000), to create the process heap, its stack (as a Windows executable can ask for a specic stack size), Wine simply use the initial stack of the ELF executable for its initialisation, but creates a new stack (as a Win32 one) for the main thread of the executable. Wine also tries to map all native DLLs at their desired address, so that no relocation has to be performed. Wine also implements the shared heap so native win9x DLLs can be used. This heap is always created at the SYSTEM_HEAP_BASE address or 0x80000000 and defaults to 16 megabytes in size. There are a few other magic locations. The bottom 64k of memory is deliberately left unmapped to catch null pointer dereferences. The region from 64k to 1mb+64k are reserved for DOS compatibility and contain various DOS data structures. Finally, the address space also contains mappings for the Wine binary itself, any native libaries Wine is using, the glibc malloc arena and so on.

Laying out the address space

Up until about the start of 2004, the Linux address space very much resembled the Windows 9x layout: the kernel sat in the top gigabyte, the bottom pages were unmapped to catch null pointer dereferences, and the rest was free. The kernels mmap algorithm was predictable: it would start by mapping les at low addresses and work up from there. The development of a series of new low level patches violated many of these assumptions, and resulted in Wine needing to force the Win32 address space layout upon the system. This section looks at why and how this is done. The exec-shield patch increases security by randomizing the kernels mmap algorithms. Rather than consistently choosing the same addresses given the same sequence of requests, the kernel will now choose randomized addresses. Because the Linux dynamic linker (ld-linux.so.2) loads DSOs into memory by using mmap, this means that DSOs are no longer loaded at predictable addresses, so making it harder to attack software by using buffer overows. It also attempts to relocate certain binaries into a special low area of memory known as the ASCII armor so making it harder to jump into them when using string based attacks. Prelink is a technology that enhances startup times by precalculating ELF global offset tables then saving the results inside the native binaries themselves. By grid tting each DSO into the address space, the dynamic linker does not have to perform as many relocations so allowing applications that heavily rely on dynamic linkage to be loaded into memory much quicker. Complex C++ applications such as Mozilla, OpenOfce and KDE can especially benet from this technique. The 4G VM split patch was developed by Ingo Molnar. It gives the Linux kernel its own address space, thereby allowing processes to access the maximum addressable amount of memory on a 32-bit machine: 4 gigabytes. It allows people with lots of RAM to fully utilise that in any given process at the cost of performance: the reason behind giving the kernel a part of each processes address space was to avoid the overhead of switching on each syscall. Each of these changes alter the address space in a way incompatible with Windows. Prelink and exec-shield mean that the libraries Wine uses can be placed at any point in the address space: typically this meant that a library was sitting in the region that the EXE you wanted to run had to be loaded (remember that unlike DLLs, EXE les cannot be moved around in memory). The 4G VM split means that programs could receive pointers to the top gigabyte of address space which some are not prepared for (they may store extra information in the high bits of a pointer, for instance). In particular, in combination with exec-shield this one is especially deadly as its possible the process heap could be allocated beyond ADDRESS_SPACE_LIMIT which causes Wine initialization to fail. The solution to these problems is for Wine to reserve particular parts of the address space so that areas that we dont want the system to use will be avoided. We later on (re/de)allocate those areas as needed. One problem is that some of these mappings are put in place automatically by the dynamic linker: for instance any libraries that Wine is linked to (like libc, libwine, libpthread etc) will be mapped into memory before Wine even gets control. In order to solve that, Wine overrides the default ELF initialization sequence at a low level and reserves the needed areas by using direct syscalls into the kernel (ie without linking against any other code to do it) before restarting the standard

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

initialization and letting the dynamic linker continue. This is referred to as the preloader and is found in loader/preloader.c. Once the usual ELF boot sequence has been completed, some native libraries may well have been mapped above the 3gig limit: however, this doesnt matter as 3G is a Windows limit, not a Linux limit. We still have to prevent the system from allocating anything else above there (like the heap or other DLLs) though so Wine performs a binary search over the upper gig of address space in order to iteratively ll in the holes with MAP_NORESERVE mappings so the address space is allocated but the memory to actually back it is not. This code can be found in libs/wine/mmap.c:reserve_area.

Multi-processing in Wine
Lets take a closer look at the way Wine loads and run processes in memory.

Starting a process from command line

When starting a Wine process from command line (well get later on to the differences between NE, PE and Winelib executables), there are a couple of things Wine need to do rst. A rst executable is run to check the threading model of the underlying OS (see the Section called Multi-threading in Wine for the details) and will start the real Wine loader corresponding to the choosen threading model. Then Wine graps a few elements from the Unix world: the environment, the program arguments. Then the ntdll.dll.so is loaded into memory using the standard shared library dynamic loader. When loaded, NTDLL will mainly rst create a decent Windows environment:

create a PEB (Process Environment Block) and a TEB (Thread Environment Block). set up the connection to the Wine server - and eventually launching the Wine server if none runs create the process heap

Then Kernel32 is loaded (but now using the Windows dynamic loading capabilities) and a Wine specic entry point is called __wine_kernel_init. This function will actually handle all the logic of the process loading and execution, and will never return from its call.
__wine_kernel_init will undergo the following tasks:

initialization of program arguments from Unix program arguments lookup of executable in the le system If the le is not found, then an error is printed and the Wine loader stops. Well cover the non-PE le type later on, so assume for now its a PE le. The PE module is loaded in memory using the same mechanisms as for a native DLLs (mainly mapping the le data and code sections into memory, and handling relocation if needed). Note that the dependencies on the module are not resolved at this point. A new stack is created, which size is given in the PE header, and this stack is made the one of the running thread (which is still the only one in the process). The stack used at startup will no longer be used. Which this new stack, ntdll.LdrInitializeThunk is called which performs the remaining initialization parts, including resolving all the DLL imports on the PE module, and doing the init of the TLS slots. Control can now be passed to the EntryPoint of the PE module, which will let the executable run.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Creating a child process from a running process

The steps used are closely link to what is done in the previous case. There are however a few points to look at a bit more closely. The inner implementation creates the child process using the fork() and exec() calls. This means that we dont need to check again for the threading model, we can use what the parent (or the grand-parent process...) started from command line has found. The Win32 process creation allows to pass a lot of information between the parent and the child. This includes object handles, windows title, console parameters, environment strings... Wine makes use of both the standard Unix inheritance mechanisms (for environment for example) and the Wine server (to pass from parent to child a chunk of data containing the relevant information). The previously described loading mechanism will check in the Wine server if such a chunk exists, and, if so, will perform the relevant initialization. Some further synchronization is also put in place: a parent will wait until the child has started, or has failed. The Wine server is also used to perform those tasks.

Starting a Winelib process

Before going into the gory details, lets rst go back to what a Winelib application is. It can be either a regular Unix executable, or a more specic Wine beast. This later form in fact creates two les for a given executable (say foo.exe). The rst one, named foo will be a symbolic link to the Wine loader (wine). The second one, named foo.exe.so, is the equivalent of the .dll.so les weve already described for DLLs. As in Windows, an executable is, among other things, a module with its import and export information, as any DLL, it makes sense Wine uses the same mechanisms for loading native executables and DLLs. When starting a Winelib application from the command line (say with foo arg1 arg2), the Unix shell will execute foo as a Unix executable. Since this is in fact the Wine loader, Wine will re up. However, will notice that it hasnt been started as wine but as foo, and hence, will try to load (using Unix shared library mechanism) the second le foo.exe.so. Wine will recognize a 32 bit module (with its descriptor) embedded in the shared library, and once the shared library loaded, it will proceed the same path as when loading a standard native PE executable. Wine needs to implement this second form of executable in order to maintain the order of initialization of some elements in the executable. One particular issue is when dealing with global C++ objects. In standard Unix executable, the call of the constructor to such objects is stored in the specic section of the executable (.init not to name it). All constructors in this section are called before the main() or WinMain function is called. Creating a Wine executable using the rst form mentionned above will let those constructors being called before Wine gets a chance to initialize itself. So, any constructor using a Windows API will fail, because Wine infrastructure isnt in place. The use of the second form for Winelib executables ensures that we do the initialization using the following steps:

initialize the Wine infrastructure load the executable into memory handle the import sections for the executable call the global object constructors (if any). They now can properly call the Windows APIs call the executable entry point

The attentive reader would have noted that the resolution of imports for the executable is done, as for a DLL, when the executable/DLL descriptor is registered. However, this is done also by adding a specic constructor in the .init section. For the above describe scheme to function properly, this constructor must be the rst constructor to be called, before all the other constructors, generated by the executable itself. The Wine build chain takes care of that, and also generating the executable/DLL descriptor for the Winelib executable.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Multi-threading in Wine
This section will assume you understand the basics of multithreading. If not there are plenty of good tutorials available on the net to get you started. Threading in Wine is somewhat complex due to several factors. The rst is the advanced level of multithreading support provided by Windows - there are far more threading related constructs available in Win32 than the Linux equivalent (pthreads). The second is the need to be able to map Win32 threads to native Linux threads which provides us with benets like having the kernel schedule them without our intervention. While its possible to implement threading entirely without kernel support, doing so is not desirable on most platforms that Wine runs on.

Threading support in Win32

Win32 is an unusually thread friendly API. Not only is it entirely thread safe, but it provides many different facilities for working with threads. These range from the basics such as starting and stopping threads, to the extremely complex such as injecting threads into other processes and COM inter-thread marshalling. One of the primary challenges of writing Wine code therefore is ensuring that all our DLLs are thread safe, free of race conditions and so on. This isnt simple - dont be afraid to ask if you arent sure whether a piece of code is thread safe or not! Win32 provides many different ways you can make your code thread safe however the most common are critical section and the interlocked functions. Critical sections are a type of mutex designed to protect a geographic area of code. If you dont want multiple threads running in a piece of code at once, you can protect them with calls to EnterCriticalSection() and LeaveCriticalSection(). The rst call to EnterCriticalSection() by a thread will lock the section and continue without stopping. If another thread calls it then it will block until the original thread calls LeaveCriticalSection() again. It is therefore vitally important that if you use critical sections to make some code thread-safe, that you check every possible codepath out of the code to ensure that any held sections are left. Code like this:
if (res != ERROR_SUCCESS) return res;

is extremely suspect in a function that also contains a call to EnterCriticalSection(). Be careful. If a thread blocks while waiting for another thread to leave a critical section, you will see an error from the RtlpWaitForCriticalSection() function, along with a note of which thread is holding the lock. This only appears after a certain timeout, normally a few seconds. Its possible the thread holding the lock is just being really slow which is why Wine wont terminate the app like a non-checked build of Windows would, but the most common cause is that for some reason a thread forgot to call LeaveCriticalSection(), or died while holding the lock (perhaps because it was in turn waiting for another lock). This doesnt just happen in Wine code: a deadlock while waiting for a critical section could be due to a bug in the app triggered by a slight difference in the emulation. Another popular mechanism available is the use of functions like InterlockedIncrement() and InterlockedExchange(). These make use of native CPU abilities to execute a single instruction while ensuring any other processors on the system cannot access memory, and allow you to do common operations like add/remove/check a variable in thread-safe code without holding a mutex. These are useful for reference counting especially in free-threaded (thread safe) COM objects. Finally, the usage of TLS slots are also popular. TLS stands for thread-local storage, and is a set of slots scoped local to a thread which you can store pointers in. Look on MSDN for the TlsAlloc() function to learn more about the Win32 implementation of this. Essentially, the contents of a given slot will be different in each thread, so you can use this to store data that is only meaningful in the context of a single thread. On recent versions of Linux the __thread keyword provides a convenient interface to this functionality - a more portable API is exposed in the pthread library. However, these facilities are not used by Wine, rather, we implement Win32 TLS entirely ourselves.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

POSIX threading vs. kernel threading

Wine runs in one of two modes: either pthreads (posix threading) or kthreads (kernel threading). This section explains the differences between them. The one that is used is automatically selected on startup by a small test program which then execs the correct binary, either wine-kthread or wine-pthread. On NPTL-enabled systems pthreads will be used, and on older non-NPTL systems kthreads is selected. Lets start with a bit of history. Back in the dark ages when Wines threading support was rst implemented a problem was faced - Windows had much more capable threading APIs than Linux did. This presented a problem Wine works either by reimplementing an API entirely or by mapping it onto the underlying systems equivalent. How could Win32 threading be implemented using a library which did not have all the needed features? The answer, of course, was that it couldnt be. On Linux the pthreads interface is used to start, stop and control threads. The pthreads library in turn is based on top of so-called "kernel threads" which are created using the clone(2) syscall. Pthreads provides a nicer (more portable) interface to this functionality and also provides APIs for controlling mutexes. There is a good tutorial on pthreads (http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/pthreads/) available if you want to learn more. As pthreads did not provide the necessary semantics to implement Win32 threading, the decision was made to implement Win32 threading on top of the underlying kernel threads by using syscalls like clone() directly. This provided maximum exibility and allowed a correct implementation but caused some bad side effects. Most notably, all the userland Linux APIs assumed that the user was utilising the pthreads library. Some only enabled thread safety when they detected that pthreads was in use - this is true of glibc, for instance. Worse, pthreads and pure kernel threads had strange interactions when run in the same process yet some libraries used by Wine used pthreads internally. Throw in source code porting using Winelib - where you have both UNIX and Win32 code in the same process - and chaos was the result. The solution was simple yet ingenious: Wine would provide its own implementation of the pthread library inside its own binary. Due to the semantics of ELF symbol scoping, this would cause Wines own implementation to override any implementation loaded later on (like the real libpthread.so). Therefore, any calls to the pthread APIs in external libraries would be linked to Wines instead of the systems pthreads library, and Wine implemented pthreads by using the standard Windows threading APIs it in turn implemented itself. As a result, libraries that only became thread-safe in the presence of a loaded pthreads implementation would now do so, and any external code that used pthreads would actually end up creating Win32 threads that Wine was aware of and controlled. This worked quite nicely for a long time, even though it required doing some extremely un-kosher things like overriding internal libc structures and functions. That is, it worked until NPTL was developed at which point the underlying thread implementation on Linux changed dramatically. The fake pthread implementation can be found in loader/kthread.c, which is used to produce the wine-kthread binary. In contrast, loader/pthread.c produces the wine-pthread binary which is used on newer NPTL systems. NPTL is a new threading subsystem for Linux that hugely improves its performance and exibility. By allowing threads to become much more scalable and adding new pthread APIs, NPTL made Linux competitive with Windows in the multi-threaded world. Unfortunately it also broke many assumptions made by Wine (as well as other applications such as the Sun JVM and RealPlayer) in the process. There was, however, some good news. NPTL made Linux threading powerful enough that Win32 threads could now be implemented on top of pthreads like any other normal application. There would no longer be problems with mixing win32-kthreads and pthreads created by external libraries, and no need to override glibc internals. As you can see from the relative sizes of the loader/kthread.c and loader/pthread.c les, the difference in code complexity is considerable. NPTL also made several other semantic changes to things such as signal delivery so changes were required in many different places in Wine. On non-Linux systems the threading interface is typically not powerful enough to replicate the semantics Win32 applications expect and so kthreads with the pthread overrides are used.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

The Win32 thread environment

All Win32 code, whether from a native EXE/DLL or in Wine itself, expects certain constructs to be present in its environment. This section explores what those constructs are and how Wine sets them up. The lack of this environment is one thing that makes it hard to use Wine code directly from standard Linux applications - in order to interact with Win32 code a thread must rst be "adopted" by Wine. The rst thing Win32 code requires is the TEB or "Thread Environment Block". This is an internal (undocumented) Windows structure associated with every thread which stores a variety of things such as TLS slots, a pointer to the threads message queue, the last error code and so on. You can see the denition of the TEB in include/thread.h, or at least what we know of it so far. Being internal and subject to change, the layout of the TEB has had to be reverse engineered from scratch. A pointer to the TEB is stored in the %fs register and can be accessed using NtCurrentTeb() from within Wine code. %fs actually stores a selector, and setting it therefore requires modifying the processes local descriptor table (LDT) - the code to do this is in lib/wine/ldt.c. The TEB is required by nearly all Win32 code run in the Wine environment, as any wineserver RPC will use it, which in turn implies that any code which could possibly block for instance by using a critical section) needs it. The TEB also holds the SEH exception handler chain as the rst element, so if disassembling you see code like this:
movl %esp, %fs:0

... then you are seeing the program set up an SEH handler frame. All threads must have at least one SEH entry, which normally points to the backstop handler which is ultimately responsible for popping up the all-too-familiar This program has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated" message. On Wine we just drop straight into the debugger. A full description of SEH is out of the scope of this section, however there are some good articles in MSJ if you are interested. All Win32-aware threads must have a wineserver connection. Many different APIs require the ability to communicate with the wineserver. In turn, the wineserver must be aware of Win32 threads in order to be able to accurately report information to other parts of the program and do things like route inter-thread messages, dispatch APCs (asynchronous procedure calls) and so on. Therefore a part of thread initialization is initializing the thread server-side. The result is not only correct information in the server, but a set of le descriptors the thread can use to communicate with the server - the request fd, reply fd and wait fd (used for blocking).

Structured Exception Handling

Structured Exception Handling (or SEH) is an implementation of exceptions inside the Windows core. It allows code written in different languages to throw exceptions across DLL boundaries, and Windows reports various errors like access violations by throwing them. This section looks at how it works, and how its implemented in Wine.

How SEH works

SEH is based on embedding EXCEPTION_REGISTRATION_RECORD structures in the stack. Together they form a linked list rooted at offset zero in the TEB (see the threading section if you dont know what this is). A registration record points to a handler function, and when an exception is thrown the handlers are executed in turn. Each handler returns a code, and they can elect to either continue through the handler chain or it can handle the exception and then restart the program. This is referred to as unwinding the stack. After each handler is called its popped off the chain. Before the system begins unwinding the stack, it runs vectored handlers. This is an extension to SEH available in Windows XP, and allows registered functions to get a rst chance to watch or deal with any exceptions thrown in the entire program, from any thread.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

A thrown exception is represented by an EXCEPTION_RECORD structure. It consists of a code, ags, an address and an arbitrary number of DWORD parameters. Language runtimes can use these parameters to associate language-specic information with the exception. Exceptions can be triggered by many things. They can be thrown explicitly by using the RaiseException API, or they can be triggered by a crash (ie, translated from a signal). They may be used internally by a language runtime to implement language-specic exceptions. They can also be thrown across DCOM connections. Visual C++ has various extensions to SEH which it uses to implement, eg, object destruction on stack unwind as well as the ability to throw arbitrary types. The code for this is in dlls/msvcrt/except.c

Translating signals to exceptions

In Windows, compilers are expected to use the system exception interface, and the kernel itself uses the same interface to dynamically insert exceptions into a running program. By contrast on Linux the exception ABI is implemented at the compiler level (inside GCC and the linker) and the kernel tells a thread of exceptional events by sending signals. The language runtime may or may not translate these signals into native exceptions, but whatever happens the kernel does not care. You may think that if an app crashes, its game over and it really shouldnt matter how Wine handles this. Its what you might intuitively guess, but youd be wrong. In fact some Windows programs expect to be able to crash themselves and recover later without the user noticing, some contain buggy binary-only components from third parties and use SEH to swallow crashes, and still others execute privileged (kernel-level) instructions and expect it to work. In fact, at least one set of APIs (the IsBad*Ptr() series) can only be implemented by performing an operation that may crash and returning TRUE if it does, and FALSE if it doesnt! So, Wine needs to not only implement the SEH infrastructure but also translate Unix signals into SEH exceptions. The code to translate signals into exceptions is a part of NTDLL, and can be found in dlls/ntdll/signal_i386.c. This le sets up handlers for various signals during Wine startup, and for the ones that indicate exceptional conditions translates them into exceptions. Some signals are used by Wine internally and have nothing to do with SEH. Signal handlers in Wine run on their own stack. Each thread has its own signal stack which resides 4k after the TEB. This is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because theres no guarantee that the app thread which triggered the signal has enough stack space for the Wine signal handling code. In Windows, if a thread hits the limits of its stack it triggers a fault on the stack guard page. The language runtime can use this to grow the stack if it wants to. However, because a guard page violation is just a regular segfault to the kernel, that would lead to a nested signal handler and that gets messy really quick so we disallow that in Wine. Secondly, setting up the exception to throw requires modifying the stack of the thread which triggered it, which is quite hard to do when youre still running on it. Windows exceptions typically contain more information than the Unix standard APIs provide. For instance, a STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION exception (0xC0000005) structure contains the faulting address, whereas a standard Unix SIGSEGV just tells the app that it crashed. Usually this information is passed as an extra parameter to the signal handler, however its location and contents vary between kernels (BSD, Solaris, etc). This data is provided in a SIGCONTEXT structure, and on entry to the signal handler it contains the register state of the CPU before the signal was sent. Modifying it will cause the kernel to adjust the context before restarting the thread.

File management
With time, Windows API comes closer to the old Unix paradigm "Everything is a le". Therefore, this whole section dedicated to le management will cover rstly the le management, but also some other objects like directories, and even devices, which are manipulated in Windows in a rather coherent way. Well see later on some other objects tting (more or less) in this picture (pipes or consoles to name a few).

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

First of all, Wine, while implementing the le interface from Windows, needs to maps a le name (expressed in the Windows world) onto a le name in the Unix world. This encompasses several aspects: how to map the le names, how to map access rights (both on les and directories), how to map physical devices (hardisks, but also other devices - like serial or parallel interfaces - and even VxDs).

Various Windows formats for le names

Lets rst review a bit the various forms Windows uses when it comes to le names.

The DOS inheritance

At the beginning was DOS, where each le has to sit on a drive, called from a single letter. For separating device names from directory or le names, a : was appended to this single letter, hence giving the (in)-famous C: drive designations. Another great invention was to use some xed names for accessing devices: not only where these named xed, in a way you couldnt change the name if youd wish to, but also, they were insensible to the location where you were using them. For example, its well known that COM1 designates the rst serial port, but its also true that c:\foo\bar\com1 also designates the rst serial port. Its still true today: on XP, you still cannot name a le COM1, whatever the directory!!! Well later on (with Windows 95), Microsoft decided to overcome some little details in le names: this included being able to get out of the 8+3 format (8 letters for the name, 3 letters for the extension), and so being able to use "long names" (thats the "ofcial" naming; as you can guess, the 8+3 format is a short name), and also to use very strange characters in a le name (like a space, or even a .). You could then name a le My File V0.1.txt, instead of myfile01.txt. Just to keep on the fun side of things, for many years the format used on the disk itself for storing the names has been the short name as the real one and to use some tricky aliasing techniques to store the long name. When some newer disk le systems have been introduced (NTFS with NT), in replacement of the old FAT system (which had little evolved since the rst days of DOS), the long name became the real name while the short name took the alias role. Windows also started to support mounting network shares, and see them as they were a local disk (through a specic drive letter). The way it has been done changed along the years, so we wont go into all the details (especially on the DOS and Win9x side).

The NT way
The introduction of NT allowed a deep change in the ways DOS had been handling devices:

Theres no longer a forest of DOS drive letters (even if the assign was a way to create symbolic links in the forest), but a single hierarchical space. This hierarchy includes several distinct elements. For example, \Device\Hardisk0\Partition0 refers to the rst partition on the rst physical hard disk of the system. This hierarchy covers way more than just the les and drives related objects, but most of the objects in the system. Well only cover here the le related part. This hierarchy is not directly accessible for the Win32 API, but only the NTDLL API. The Win32 API only allows to manipulate part of this hierarchy (the rest being hidden from the Win32 API). Of course, the part you see from Win32 API looks very similar to the one that DOS provided. Mounting a disk is performed by creating a symbol link in this hierarchy from \Global??\C: (the name seen from the Win32 API) to \Device\Harddiskvolume1 which determines the partition on a physical disk where C: is going to be seen. Network shares are also accessible through a symbol link. However in this case, a symbol link is created from \Global??\UNC\host\share\ for the share share on the machine host) to whats called a network

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

redirector, and which will take care of 1/ the connection to the remote share, 2/ handling with that remote share the rest of the path (after the name of the server, and the name of the share on that server).
Note: In NT naming convention, \Global?? can also be called \?? to shorten the access.

All of these things, make the NT system pretty much more exible (you can add new types of lesystems if you want), you provide a unique name space for all objects, and most operations boil down to creating relationship between different objects.

Wrap up
Lets end this chapter about les in Windows with a review of the different formats used for le names:
c:\foo\bar \foo\bar

is a full path.

is an absolute path; the full path is created by appending the default drive (ie. the drive of the current

directory).
bar

is a relative path; the full path is created by adding the current directory.

c:bar

is a drive relative path. Note that the case where c: is the drive of the current directory is rather easy; its implemented the same way as the case just below (relative path). In the rest of this chapter, drive relative path will only cover the case where the drive in the path isnt the drive of the default directory. The resolution of this to a full pathname defers according to the version of Windows, and some parameters. Lets take some time browsing through these issues. On Windows 9x (as well as on DOS), the system maintains a process wide set of default directories per drive. Hence, in this case, it will resolve c:bar to the default directory on drive c: plus le bar. Of course, the default per drive directory is updated each time a new current directory is set (only the current directory of the drive specied is modied). On Windows NT, things differ a bit. Since NT implements a namespace for le closer to a single tree (instead of 26 drives), having a current directory per drive is a bit ackward. Hence, Windows NT default behavior is to have only one current directory across all drives (in fact, a current directory expressed in the global tree) - this directory is of course related to a given process -, c:bar is resolved this way:

If c: is the drive of the default directory, the nal path is the current directory plus bar. Otherwise its resolved into c:\bar. In order to bridge the gap between the two implementations (Windows 9x and NT), NT adds a bit of complexity on the second case. If the =C: environment variable is dened, then its value is used as a default directory for drive C:. This is handy, for example, when writing a DOS shell, where having a current drive per drive is still implemented, even on NT. This mechanism (through environment variables) is implemented on CMD.EXE, where those variables are set when you change directories with the cd. Since environment variables are inherited at process creation, the current directories settings are inherited by child processes, hence mimicing the behavior of the old DOS shell. Theres no mechanism (in NTDLL or KERNEL32) to set up, when current directory changes, the relevant environment variables. This behavior is clearly band-aid, not a full featured extension of current directory behavior.

Wine fully implements all those behaviors (the Windows 9x vs NT ones are triggered by the version ag in Wine).
\\host\share \\.\device

is UNC (Universal Naming Convention) path, ie. represents a le on a remote share.

denotes a physical device installed in the system (as seen from the Win32 subsystem). A standard NT system will map it to the \??\device NT path. Then, as a standard conguration, \??\device is likely to

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

be a link to in a physical device described and hooked into the \Device\ tree. For example, COM1 is a link to
\Device\Serial0.

On some versions of Windows, paths were limited to MAX_PATH characters. To circumvent this, Microsoft allowed paths to be 32,767 characters long, under the conditions that the path is expressed in Unicode (no Ansi version), and that the path is prexed with \\?\. This convention is applicable to any of the cases described above.

To summarize, what weve discussed so, lets put everything into a single table... Table 8-1. DOS, Win32 and NT paths equivalences Type of path Full path Absolute path Win32 example
c:\foo\bar.txt \foo\bar.txt

NT equivalent
\Global??\C:\foo\bar.txt \Global??\J:\foo\bar.txt

Rule to cons

Simple concat

Simple conca using the drive default directo

Relative path

gee\bar.txt

Simple conca (here

\Global??\J:\mydir\mysubdir\gee\bar.txt using the defa

J:\mydir\my

Drive relative path

j:gee\bar.txt

On Windows 9x (and DOS),

J:\toto\gee\bar.txt.

On Windows NT, J:\gee\bar.txt.

On Windo DOS), \tot default direc J:. On Win =J: isnt s

On Windows NT,

J:\tata\titi\bar.txt.

On Win =J: is set

J:\tata

UNC (Uniform Naming Convention) path Device path Long paths

\\host\share\foo\bar.txt

Simple conca
\Global??\UNC\host\share\foo\bar.txt

\\.\device \\?\...

\Global??\device

Simple concat

With this pre take up to 32, characters, ins MAX_PATH for others). Once stripped, to be one of the prev just providing buffers large e

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Wine implementation
Well mainly cover in this section the way Wine opens a le (in the Unix sense) when given a Windows le name. This will include mapping the Windows path onto a Unix path (including the devices case), handling the access rights, the sharing attribute if any...

Mapping a Windows path into an absolute Windows path

First of all, we described in previous section the way to convert any path in an absolute path. Wine implements all the previous algorithms in order to achieve this. Note also, that this transformation is done with information local to the process (default directory, environment variables...). Well assume in the rest of this section that all paths have now been transformed into absolute from.

Mapping a Windows (absolute) path onto a Unix path

When Wine is requested to map a path name (in DOS form, with a drive letter, e.g. c:\foo\bar\myfile.txt), Wine converts this into the following Unix path $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/c:/foo/bar/myfile.txt. The Wine conguration process is responsible for setting $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/c: to be a symbolic link pointing to the directory in Unix hierarchy the user wants to expose as the C: drive in the DOS forest of drives. This scheme allows:

a very simple algorithm to map a DOS path name into a Unix one (no need of Wine server calls) a very congurable implementation: its very easy to change a drive mapping a rather readable conguration: no need of sophisticated tools to read a drive mapping, a ls -l $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices says it all.

This scheme is also used to implement UNC path names. For example, Wine maps \\host\share\foo\bar\MyRemoteFile.txt into
$(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/unc/host/share/foo/bar/MyRemoteFile.txt. Its then up to the user to decide where $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/unc/host/share shall point to (or be). For example, it can either

be a symbolic link to a directory inside the local machine (just for emulation purpose), or a symbolic link to the mount point of a remote disk (done through Samba or NFS), or even the real mount point. Wine will not do any checking here, nor will help in actually mounting the remote drive. Weve seen how Wine maps a drive letter or a UNC path onto the Unix hierarchy, we now have to look on a the lename is searched within this hierarchy. The main issue is about case sensivity. Heres a reminder of the various properties for the le systems in the eld. Table 8-2. File systems properties FS Name FAT, FAT16 or FAT32 VFAT Length of elements Short name (8+3) Short name (8+3) + alias on long name Case sensitivity (on disk) Case sensitivity for lookup

Names are always stored in Case insensitive upper-case Short names are always Case insensitive stored in upper-case. Long names are stored with case preservation.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

FS Name NTFS

Length of elements

Case sensitivity (on disk)

Case sensitivity for lookup Case insentivite

Long name + alias on short Long names are stored name (8+3). with case preservation. Short names are always stored in upper-case. Long name Case preserving

Linux FS (ext2fs, ext3fs, reiserfs...)

Case sensitive

Case sensitivity vs. preservation: When we say that most systems in NT are case insensitive, this has to be understood for looking up for a le, where the matches are made in a case insensitive mode. This is different from VFAT or NTFS "case preservation" mechanism, which stores the le names as they are given when creating the le, while doing case insensitive matches.

Since most le systems used in NT are case insensitive and since most Unix le systems are case sensitive, Wine undergo a case insensitive search when it has found the Unix path is has to look for. This means, for example, that for opening the $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/c:/foo/bar/myfile.txt, Wine will recursively open all directories in the path, and check, in this order, for the existence of the directory entry in the form given in the le name (ie. case sensitive), and if its not found, in a case insensitive form. This allows to also pass, in most Win32 le API also a Unix path (instead of a DOS or NT path), but well come back to this later. This also means that the algorithm described doesnt correctly handle the case of two les in the same directory, which names only differ on the case of the letters. This means, that if, in the same directory, two les (which names match in a case sensitive comparison), Wine will pick-up the right one if the lename given matches on of the name (in a case sensitive way), but will pickup one of the two (without dening the one its going to pickup) if the lename given matches none of the two names in a case sensitive way (but in a case insensitive way). For example, if the two lenames are my_neat_file.txt and My_Neat_File.txt, Wines behavior when opening MY_neat_FILE.txt is undened.

As Windows, at the early days, didnt support the notion of symbolic links on directories, lots of applications (and some old native DLLs) are not ready for this feature. Mainly, they imply that the directory structure is a tree, which has lots of consequences on navigating in the forest of directories (ie: there cannot be two ways for going from directory to another, there cannot be cycles...). In order to prevent some bad behavior for such applications, Wine sets up an option. By default, symbolic links on directories are not followed by Wine. Theres an options to follow them (see the Wine User Guide), but this could be harmful. Wine considers that Unix le names are long lename. This seems a reasonable approach; this is also the approach followed by most of the Unix OSes while mounting Windows partitions (with lesystems like FAT, FAT32 or NTFS). Therefore, Wine tries to support short names the best it can. Basically, they are two options:

The lesystem on which the inspected directory lies in a real Windows FS (like FAT, or FAT32, or NTFS) and the OS has support to access the short lename (for example, Linux does this on FAT, FAT32 or VFAT). In this case, Wine makes full use of this information and really mimics the Windows behavior: the short lename used for any le is the same than on Windows. If conditions listed above are not met (either, FS has no physical short name support, or OS doesnt provide the access access to the short name), Wine decides and computes on its own the short lename for a given long lename. We cannot ensure that the generated short name is the same than on Windows (because the algorithm on Windows takes into account the order of creation of les, which cannot be implemented in Wine: Wine would have to cache the short names of every directory it uses!). The short name is made up of part of the long name (rst characters) and the rest with a hashed value. This has several advantages:

The algorithm is rather simple and low cost. The algorithm is stateless (doesnt depend of the other les in the directory).

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

But, it also has the drawbacks (of the advantages):

The algorithm isnt the same as on Windows, which means a program cannot use short names generated on Windows. This could happen when copying an existing installed program from Windows (for example, on a dual boot machine). Two long le names can end up with the same short name (Windows handles the collision in this case, while Wine doesnt). We rely on our hash algorithm to lower at most this possibility (even if it exists).

Wine also allows in most le API to give as a parameter a full Unix path name. This is handy when running a Wine (or Winelib) program from the command line, and one doesnt need to convert the path into the Windows form. However, Wine checks that the Unix path given can be accessed from one of the dened drives, insuring that only part of the Unix / hierarchy can be accessed. As a side note, as Unix doesnt widely provide a Unicode interface to the lenames, and that Windows implements lenames as Unicode strings (even on the physical layer with NTFS, the FATs variant are ANSI), we need to properly map between the two. At startup, Wine denes whats called the Unix Code Page, thats is the code page the Unix kernel uses as a reference for the strings. Then Wine uses this code page for all the mappings it has to do between a Unicode path (on the Windows side) and a Ansi path to be used in a Unix path API. Note, that this will work as long as a disk isnt mounted with a different code page than the one the kernel uses as a default. We describe below how Windows devices are mapped to Unix devices. Before that, lets nish the pure le round-up with some basic operations.

Access rights and le attributes

Now that we have looked how Wine converts a Windows pathname into a Unix one, we need to cover the various meta-data attached to a le or a directory. In Windows, access rights are simplistic: a le can be read-only or read-write. Wine sets the read-only ag if the le doesnt have the Unix user-write ag set. As a matter of fact, theres no way Wine can return that a le cannot be read (that doesnt exist under Windows). The le will be seen, but trying to open it will return an error. The Unix exec-ag is never reported. Wine doesnt use this information to allow/forbid running a new process (as Unix does with the exec-ag). Last but not least: hidden les. This exists on Windows but not really on Unix! To be exact, in Windows, the hidden ag is a metadata associated to any le or directoy; in Unix, its a convention based on the syntax of the le name (whether it starts with a . or not). Wine implements two behaviors (chosen by conguration). This impacts le names and directory names starting by a .. In rst mode (ShowDotFile is FALSE), every le or directory starting by . is returned with the hidden ag turned on. This is the natural behavior on Unix (for ls or even le explorer). In the second mode (ShowDotFile is TRUE), Wine never sets the hidden ag, hence every le will be seen. Last but not least, before opening a le, Windows makes use of sharing attributes in order to check whether the le can be opened; for example, a process, being the rst in the system to open a given le, could forbid, while it maintains the le opened, that another process opens it for write access, whereas open for read access would be granted. This is fully supported in Wine by moving all those checks in the Wine server for a global view on the system. Note also that whats moved in the Wine server is the check, when the le is opened, to implement the Windows sharing semantics. Further operation on the le (like reading and writing) will not require heavy support from the server. The other good reason for putting the code for actually opening a le in the server is that an opened les in Windows is managed through a handle, and handles can only be created in Wine server! Just a note about attributes on directories: while we can easily map the meaning of Windows FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY on a le, we cannot do it for a directory. Windows semantic (when this ag is set) means do not delete the directory, while the w attribute in Unix means dont write nor delete it. Therefore, Wine uses

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

an asymetric mapping here: if the directory (in Unix) isnt writable, then Wine reports the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY attribute; on the other way around, when asked to set a directory with FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY attribute, Wine simply does nothing.

Operations on le
Reading and writing Reading and writing are the basic operations on les. Wine of course implements this, and bases the implementation on client side calls to Unix equivalents (like read() or write()). Note, that the Wine server is involved in any read or write operation, as Wine needs to transform the Windows-handle to the le into a Unix le descriptor it can pass to any Unix le function. Getting a Unix fd This is major operation in any le related operation. Basically, each le opened (at the Windows level), is rst opened in the Wine server, where the fd is stored. Then, Wine (on client side) uses recvmsg() to pass the fd from the wine server process to the client process. Since this operation could be lengthy, Wine implement some kind of cache mechanism to send it only once, but getting a fd from a handle on a le (or any other Unix object which can be manipulated through a le descriptor) still requires a round trip to the Wine server. Locking Windows provides le locking capabilities. When a lock is set (and a lock can be set on any contiguous range in a le), it controls how other processes in the system will have access to the range in the le. Since locking range on a le are dened on a system wide manner, its implementation resides in wineserver. It tries to make use Unix le locking (if the underlying OS and the mounted disk where the le sits support this feature) with fcntl() and the F_SETLK command. If this isnt supported, then wineserver just pretends it works. I/O control Theres no need (so far) to implement support (for les and directories) for DeviceIoControl(), even if this is supported by Windows, but for very specic needs (like compression management, or le system related information). This isnt the case for devices (including disks), but well cover this in the hereafter section related to devices. Buffering Wine doesnt do any buffering on le accesses but rely on the underlying Unix kernel for that (when possible). This scheme is needed because its easier to implement multiple accesses on the same le at the kernel level, rather than at Wine levels. Doing lots of small reads on the same le can turn into a performance hog, because each read operation needs a round trip to the server in order to get a le descriptor (see above). Overlapped I/O Windows introduced the notion of overlapped I/O. Basically, it just means that an I/O operation (think read / write to start with) will not wait until its completed, but rather return to the caller as soon as possible, and let the caller handle the wait operation and determine when the data is ready (for a read operation) or has been sent (for a write operation). Note that the overlapped operation is linked to a specic thread. There are several interests to this: a server can handle several clients without requiring multi-threading techniques; you can handle an event driven model more easily (ie how to kill properly a server while waiting in the lengthy read() operation).

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Note that Microsofts support for this feature evolved along the various versions of Windows. For example, Windows 95 or 98 only supports overlapped I/O for serial and parallel ports, while NT supports also les, disks, sockets, pipes, or mailslots. Wine implements overlapped I/O operations. This is mainly done by queueing in the server a request that will be triggered when something the current state changes (like data available for a read operation). This readiness is signaled to the calling processing by queueing a specic APC, which will be called within the next waiting operation the thread will have. This specic APC will then do the hard work of the I/O operation. This scheme allows to put in place a wait mechanism, to attach a routine to be called (on the thread context) when the state changes, and to be done is a rather transparent manner (embedded any the generic wait operation). However, it isnt 100% perfect. As the heavy operations are done in the context of the calling threads, if those operations are lengthy, there will be an impact on the calling thread, especially its latency. In order to provide an effective support for this overlapped I/O operations, we would need to rely on Unix kernel features (AIO is a good example).

Devices & volume management

Weve covered so far the ways le names are mapped into Unix paths. Theres still need to cover it for devices. As a regular le, devices are manipulated in Windows with both read / write operations, but also control mechanisms (speed or parity of a serial line; volume name of a hard disk...). Since, this is also supported in Linux, theres also a need to open (in a Unix sense) a device when given a Windows device name. This section applies to DOS device names, which are seen in NT as nicknames to other devices. Firstly, Wine implements the Win32 to NT mapping as described above, hence every device path (in NT sense) is of the following form: /??/devicename (or /DosDevices/devicename). As Windows device names are case insensitive, Wine also converts them to lower case before any operation. Then, the rst operation Wine tries is to check whether $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/devicename exists. If so, its used as the nal Unix path for the device. The conguration process is in charge of creating for example, a symbolic link between $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/PhysicalDrive0 and /dev/hda0. If such a link cannot be found, and the device name looks like a DOS disk name (like C:), Wine rst tries to get the Unix device from the path $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/c: (i.e. the device which is mounted on the target of the symbol link); if this doesnt give a Unix device, Wine tries whether $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/c:: exists. If so, its assumed to be a link to the actual Unix device. For example, for a CD Rom, $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/e:: would be a symbolic link to /dev/cdrom. If this doesnt exist (were still handling the a device name of the C: form), Wine tries to get the Unix device from the system information (/etc/mtab and /etc/fstab on Linux). We cannot apply this method in all the cases, because we have no insurance that the directory can actually be found. One could have, for example, a CD Rom which he/she want only to use as audio CD player (ie never mounted), thus not having any information of the device itself. If all of this doesnt work either, some basic operations are checked: if the devicename is NUL, then /dev/null is returned. If the device name is a default serial name (COM1 up to COM9) (resp. printer name LPT1 up to LPT9), then Wine tries to open the Nth serial (resp. printer) in the system. Otherwise, some basic old DOS name support is done AUX is transformed into COM1 and PRN into LPT1), and the whole process is retried with those new names. To sum up: Table 8-3. Mapping of Windows device names into Unix device names Windows device name
<any_path>AUX <any_path>PRN

NT device name
>\Global??\AUX \Global??\PRN

Mapping to Unix device name Treated as an alias to COM1 Treated as an alias to LPT1

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Windows device name

<any_path>COM1

NT device name
\Global??\COM1

Mapping to Unix device name

$(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/com1

(if the symbol link exists) or the Nth serial line in the system (on Linux, /dev/ttyS0).
<any_path>LPT1 \Global??\LPT1 $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/lpt1

(if the symbol link exists) or the Nth printer in the system (on Linux, /dev/lp0).
<any_path>NUL \\.\E: \Global??\NUL \Global??\E: $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/e:: /dev/null

(if the symbolic link exists) or guessing the device from /etc/mtab or /etc/fstab.
\\.\<device_name> \Global??\<device_name> $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/<device_name>

(if the symbol link exists).

Now that we know which Unix device to open for a given Windows device, lets cover the operation on it. Those operations can either be read / write, io control (and even others). Read and write operations are supported on Real disks & CDROM devices, under several conditions:

Foremost, as the ReadFile() and WriteFile() calls are mapped onto the Unix read() and write() calls, the user (from the Unix perspective of the one running the Wine executable) must have read (resp. write) access to the device. It wouldnt be wise to let a user write directly to a hard disk!!! Blocks size for read and write but be of the size of a physical block (generally 512 for a hard disk, depends on the type of CD used), and offsets must also be a multiple of the block size.

Wine also reads (if the rst condition above about access rights is met) the volume information from a hard disk or a CD ROM to be displayed to a user. Wine also recognizes VxD as devices. But those VxD must be the Wine builtin ones (Wine will never allow to load native VxD). Those are congured with symbolic links in the $(WINEPREFIX)/dosdevices/ directory, and point to the actual builtin DLL. This DLL exports a single entry point, that Wine will use when a call to DeviceIoControl is made, with a handle opened to this VxD. This allows to provide some kind of compatibility for old Win9x apps, still talking directly to VxD. This is no longer supported on Windows NT, newest programs are less likely to make use of this feature, so we dont expect lots of development in this area, even though the framework is there and working. Note also that Wine doesnt provide support for native VxDs (as a game, report how many times this information is written in the documentation; as an advanced exercise, nd how many more occurrences we need in order to stop questions whether its possible or not).

NTDLL module
NTDLL provides most of the services youd expect from a kernel. In lots of cases, KERNEL32 APIs are just wrappers

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

to NTDLL APIs. There are however, some difference in the APIs (the NTDLL ones have quite often a bit wider semantics than their KERNEL32 counterparts). All the detailed functions weve described since the beginning of this chapter are in fact implemented in NTDLL, plus a great numbers of others we havens written about yet.

KERNEL32 Module
As already explained, KERNEL32 maps quite a few of its APIs to NTDLL. There are however a couple of things which are handled directly in KERNEL32. Lets cover a few of them...

Console
NT implementation
Windows implements console solely in the Win32 subsystem. Under NT, the real implementation uses a dedicated subsystem csrss.exe Client/Server Run-time SubSystem) which is in charge, amont other things, of animating the consoles. Animating includes for example handling several processes on the same console (write operations must be atomic, but also a character keyed on the console must be read by a single process), or sending some information back to the processes (changing the size or attributes of the console, closing the console). Windows NT uses a dedicated (RPC based) protocol between each process being attached to a console and the csrss.exe subsystem, which is in charge of the UI of every console in the system.

Wine implementation
Wine tries to integrate as much as possible into the Unix consoles, but the overall situation isnt perfect yet. Basically, Wine implements three kinds of consoles:

the rst one is a direct mapping of the Unix console into the Windows environment. From the windows program point of view, it wont run in a Windows console, but it will see its standard input and output streams redirected to les; thoses les are hooked into the Unix consoles output and input streams respectively. This is handy for running programs from a Unix command line (and use the result of the program as it was a Unix programs), but it lacks all the semantics of the Windows consoles. the second and third ones are closer to the NT scheme, albeit different from what NT does. The wineserver plays the role of the csrss.exe subsystem (all requests are sent to it), and are then dispatched to a dedicated wine process, called (surprise!) wineconsole which manages the UI of the console. There is a running instance of wineconsole for every console in the system. Two avors of this scheme are actually implemented: they vary on the backend for the wineconsole. The rst one, dubbed user, creates a real GUI window (hence the USER name) and renders the console in this window. The second one uses the (n)curses library to take full control of an existing Unix console; of course, interaction with other Unix programs will not be as smooth as the rst solution.

The following table describes the main implementation differences between the three approaches. Table 8-4. Function consoles implementation comparison Function Bare streams Wineconsole & user backend Wineconsole & curses backend

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Function Console as a Win32 Object (and associated handles)

Bare streams No specic Win32 object is used in this case. The handles manipulated for the standard Win32 streams are in fact "bare handles" to their corresponding Unix streams. The mode manipulation functions (GetConsoleMode() / SetConsoleMode()) are not supported. Not supported. Every process child of a process will inherit the Unix streams, so will also inherit the Win32 standard streams. Fully supported Not supported

Wineconsole & user backend Implemented in server, and a specic Winelib program (wineconsole) is in charge of the rendering and user input. The mode manipulation functions behave as expected.

Wineconsole & curses backend Implemented in server, and a specic Winelib program (wineconsole) is in charge of the rendering and user input. The mode manipulation functions behave as expected.

Inheritance (including handling in CreateProcess() of CREATE_DETACHED,

CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE

ags).
ReadFile() / WriteFile() operations

Fully supported (each new Fully supported, except console creation will be for the creation of a new handled by the creation of console, which will be a new USER32 window) rendered on the same Unix terminal as the previous one, leading to unpredictable results. Fully supported Fully supported Fully supported Partly supported (this wont work too well as we dont control (so far) the size of underlying Unix terminal Fully supported

Screen-buffer manipulation (creation, deletion, resizing...)

APIs for reading/writing screen-buffer content, cursor position APIs for manipulating the rendering window size

Not supported

Fully supported

Not supported

Fully supported

Partly supported (this wont work too well as we dont control (so far) the size of underlying Unix terminal Partly supported (Ctrl-C behaves as expected, however the other Win32 CUI signaling isnt properly implemented).

Signaling (in particular, Ctrl-C handling)

Nothing is done, which means that Ctrl-C will generate (as usual) a SIGINT which will terminate the program.

Partly supported (Ctrl-C behaves as expected, however the other Win32 CUI signaling isnt properly implemented).

The Win32 objects behind a console can be created in several occasions:

When the program is started from wineconsole, a new console object is created and will be used (inherited) by the process launched from wineconsole. When a program, which isnt attached to a console, calls AllocConsole(), Wine then launches wineconsole, and attaches the current program to this console. In this mode, the USER32 mode is always selected as Wine cannot tell the current state of the Unix console.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Please also note, that starting a child process with the CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE ag, will end-up calling AllocConsole() in the child process, hence creating a wineconsole with the USER32 backend. Another interesting point to note is that Windows implements handles to console objects (input and screen buffers) only in the KERNEL32 DLL, and those are not sent nor seen from the NTDLL level, albeit, for example, console are waitable on input. How is this possible? Well, Windows NT is a bit tricky here. Regular handles have an interesting property: their integral value is always a multiple of four (they are likely to be offsets from the beginning of a table). Console handles, on the other hand, are not multiple of four, but have the two lower bit set (being a multiple of four means having the two lower bits reset). When KERNEL32 sees a handle with the two lower bits set, it then knows its a console handle and takes appropriate decisions. For example, in the various kernel32!WaitFor*() functions, it transforms any console handle (input and output - strangely enough handles to consoles screen buffers are waitable) into a dedicated wait event for the targetted console. Theres an (undocumented) KERNEL32 function GetConsoleInputWaitHandle() which returns the handle to this event in case you need it. Another interesting handling of those consoles handles is in ReadFile() (resp. WriteFile()), which behavior, for consoles handles, is transferred to ReadConsole() (resp. WriteConsole()). Note thats always the ANSI version of ReadConsole() / WriteConsole() which is called, hence using the default consoles code page. There are some other spots affected, but you can look in dlls/kernel to nd them all. All of this is implemented in Wine. Wine also implements the same layout of the registry for storing the preferences of the console as Windows does. Those settings can either be dened globally, or on a per process name basis. wineconsole provides the choice to the user to pick you which registry part (global, current running program) it wishes to modify the settings for. Table 8-5. Console registry settings Name CursorSize CursorVisible EditionMode Default value 25 1 0 Purpose Percentage of cell height to which the cursor extents Whether the cursor is visible or not The way the edition takes place in the console: 0 is insertion mode, 1 is overwrite mode. Whether the console should close itself when last running program attached to it dies Name of the font to be used for display. When none is given, wineconsole tries its best to pick up a decent font The high word in the fonts cell height, and the low word is the font cells width. The default value is 12 pixels in height and 8 pixels in width. Weigth of the font. If none is given (or 0) wineconsole picks up a decent font size Number of entries in history buffer (not actually used) Whether the history should store twice the same entry

ExitOnDie

FaceName

No default

FontSize

0x0C08

FontWeight

HistoryBufferSize HistoryNoDup

50 0

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Name MenuMask

Default value 0

Purpose This mask only exists for Wine console handling. It allows to know which combination of extra keys are need to open the conguration window on right click. The mask can include MK_CONTROL or MK_SHIFT bits. This can be needed when programs actually need the right click to be passed to them instead of being intercepted by wineconsole. If null, mouse events are sent to the application. If non null, mouse events are used to select text on the window. This setting must really be set on a application per application basis, because it deals with the fact the CUI application will use or not the mouse events. The high word is the number of font cells in the height of the screen buffer, while the low word is the number of font cells in the width of the screen buffer. Default color attribute for the screen buffer (low char is the foreground color, and high char is the background color) The high word is the number of font cells in the height of the window, while the low word is the number of font cells in the width of the window. This window is the visible part of the screen buffer: this implies that a screen buffer must always be bigger than its window, and that the screen buffer can be scrolled so that every cell of the screen buffer can be seen in the window.

QuickEdit

ScreenBufferSize

0x1950

ScreenColors

0x000F

WindowSize

0x1950

Win16 processes support

Starting a NE (Win16) process
Wine is also able to run 16 bit processes, but this feature is only supported on Intel IA-32 architectures. When Wine is requested to run a NE (Win 16 process), it will in fact hand over the execution of it to a specic executable winevdm. VDM stands for Virtual DOS Machine. This winevdm is a Winelib application, but will in fact set up the correct 16 bit environment to run the executable. We will get back later on in details to what this means.

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

Any new 16 bit process created by this executable (or its children) will run into the same winevdm instance. Among one instance, several functionalities will be provided to those 16 bit processes, including the cooperative multitasking, sharing the same address space, managing the selectors for the 16 bit segments needed for code, data and stack. Note that several winevdm instances can run in the same Wine session, but the functionalities described above are only shared among a given instance, not among all the instances. winevdm is built as Winelib application, and hence has access to any facility a 32 bit application has. Each Win16 application is implemented in winevdm as a Win32 thread. winevdm then implements its own scheduling facilities (in fact, the code for this feature is in the krnl386.exe DLL). Since the required Win16 scheduling is non pre-emptive, this doesnt require any underlying OS kernel support.

SysLevels
SysLevels are an undocumented Windows-internal thread-safety system dedicated to 16 bit applications (or 32 bit applications that call - directly or indirectly - 16 bit code). They are basically critical sections which must be taken in a particular order. The mechanism is generic but there are always three syslevels:

level 1 is the Win16 mutex, level 2 is the USER mutex, level 3 is the GDI mutex.

When entering a syslevel, the code (in dlls/kernel/syslevel.c) will check that a higher syslevel is not already held and produce an error if so. This is because its not legal to enter level 2 while holding level 3 - rst, you must leave level 3. Throughout the code you may see calls to _ConfirmSysLevel() and _CheckNotSysLevel(). These functions are essentially assertions about the syslevel states and can be used to check that the rules have not been accidentally violated. In particular, _CheckNotSysLevel() will break probably into the debugger) if the check fails. If this happens the solution is to get a backtrace and nd out, by reading the source of the wine functions called along the way, how Wine got into the invalid state.

Memory management
Every Win16 address is expressed in the form of selector:offset. The selector is an entry in the LDT, but a 16 bit entry, limiting each offset to 64 KB. Hence, the maximum available memory to a Win16 process is 512 MB. Note, that the processor runs in protected mode, but using 16 bit selectors. Windows, for a 16 bit process, denes a few selectors to access the "real" memory (the one provided) by DOS. Basically, Wine also provides this area of memory.

DOS processes support

The behaviour we just described also applies to DOS executables, which are handled the same way by winevdm. This is only supported on Intel IA-32 architectures. Wine implements also most of the DOS support in a Wine specic DLL (winedos). This DLL is called under certain conditions, like:

In winevdm, when trying to launch a DOS application (.EXE or .COM, .PIF).

Chapter 8. Kernel modules

In kernel32, when an attempt is made in the binary code to call some DOS or BIOS interrupts (like Int 21h for example).

When winevdm runs a DOS program, this one runs in real mode (in fact in V86 mode from the IA-32 point of view). Wine also supports part of the DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface). Wine, when running a DOS programs, needs to map the 1 MB of virtual memory to the real memory (as seen by the DOS program). When this is not possible (like when someone else is already using this area), the DOS support is not possible. Not also that by doing so, access to linear address 0 is enabled (as its also real mode address 0 which is valid). Hence, NULL pointer dereference faults are no longer caught.

Chapter 9. Graphical modules

GDI Module
X Windows System interface
The X libraries used to implement X clients (such as Wine) do not work properly if multiple threads access the same display concurrently. It is possible to compile the X libraries to perform their own synchronization (initiated by calling XInitThreads()). However, Wine does not use this approach. Instead Wine performs its own synchronization using the wine_tsx11_lock() / wine_tsx11_unlock() functions. This locking protects library access with a critical section, and also arranges things so that X libraries compiled without -D_REENTRANT (eg. with global errno variable) will work with Wine. In the past, all calls to X used to go through a wrapper called TSX...() (for "Thread Safe X ..."). While it is still being used in the code, its inefcient as the lock is potentially acquired and released unnecessarily. New code should explicitly acquire the lock.

Chapter 10. Windowing system

USER Module
USER implements windowing and messaging subsystems. It also contains code for common controls and for other miscellaneous stuff (rectangles, clipboard, WNet, etc). Wine USER code is located in windows/, controls/, and misc/ directories.

Windowing subsystem
windows/win.c windows/winpos.c

Windows are arranged into parent/child hierarchy with one common ancestor for all windows (desktop window). Each window structure contains a pointer to the immediate ancestor (parent window if WS_CHILD style bit is set), a pointer to the sibling (returned by GetWindow(..., GW_NEXT)), a pointer to the owner window (set only for popup window if it was created with valid hwndParent parameter), and a pointer to the rst child window (GetWindow(.., GW_CHILD)). All popup and non-child windows are therefore placed in the rst level of this hierarchy and their ancestor link (wnd->parent) points to the desktop window.
Desktop window - root window | \ -. | \ -. popup -> wnd1 -> wnd2 - top level windows | \ -. -. | \ -. -. child1 child2 -> child3 child4 - child windows

Horizontal arrows denote sibling relationship, vertical lines - ancestor/child. To summarize, all windows with the same immediate ancestor are sibling windows, all windows which do not have desktop as their immediate ancestor are child windows. Popup windows behave as topmost top-level windows unless they are owned. In this case the only requirement is that they must precede their owners in the top-level sibling list (they are not topmost). Child windows are conned to the client area of their parent windows (client area is where window gets to do its own drawing, non-client area consists of caption, menu, borders, intrinsic scrollbars, and minimize/maximize/close/help buttons). Another fairly important concept is z-order. It is derived from the ancestor/child hierarchy and is used to determine "above/below" relationship. For instance, in the example above, z-order is
child1->popup->child2->child3->wnd1->child4->wnd2->desktop.

Current active window ("foreground window" in Win32) is moved to the front of z-order unless its top-level ancestor owns popup windows. All these issues are dealt with (or supposed to be) in windows/winpos.c with SetWindowPos() being the primary interface to the window manager. Wine specics: in default and managed mode each top-level window gets its own X counterpart with desktop window being basically a fake stub. In desktop mode, however, only desktop window has an X window associated with it. Also, SetWindowPos() should eventually be implemented via Begin/End/DeferWindowPos() calls and not the other way around.

Chapter 10. Windowing system

Visible region, clipping region and update region

windows/dce.c windows/winpos.c windows/painting.c ________________________ |_________ | | A |______ | | | | | |--------- | | | | B | | | | | | | ------------ | | C | ------------------------ A and B are child windows of C

Visible region determines which part of the window is not obscured by other windows. If a window has the WS_CLIPCHILDREN style then all areas below its children are considered invisible. Similarly, if the WS_CLIPSIBLINGS bit is in effect then all areas obscured by its siblings are invisible. Child windows are always clipped by the boundaries of their parent windows. B has a WS_CLIPSIBLINGS style:
. : | | | : ______ | | ,----- | | B | - visible region of B | | ------------

When the program requests a display context (DC) for a window it can specify an optional clipping region that further restricts the area where the graphics output can appear. This area is calculated as an intersection of the visible region and a clipping region. Program asked for a DC with a clipping region:
______ ,--|--. | ,--+-- | | | | B | | | | | | --|-----|--- ----- . : => | | : ,--. _: | | | - DC region where the painting will | | be visible ----

When the window manager detects that some part of the window became visible it adds this area to the update region of this window and then generates WM_ERASEBKGND and WM_PAINT messages. In addition, WM_NCPAINT message is sent when the uncovered area intersects a nonclient part of the window. Application must reply to the WM_PAINT message by calling the BeginPaint()/EndPaint() pair of functions. BeginPaint() returns a DC that uses accumulated update region as a clipping region. This operation cleans up invalidated area and the window will not receive another WM_PAINT until the window manager creates a new update region. A was moved to the left:
________________________ |______ | | A |_________ | ... / C update region : .___ / => | ...|___|..

Chapter 10. Windowing system

| | | | |------ | | | | B | | | | | | | ------------ | | C | ------------------------

| | | :

: : :

| | --- \ \ B update region

Windows maintains a display context cache consisting of entries that include the DC itself, the window to which it belongs, and an optional clipping region (visible region is stored in the DC itself). When an API call changes the state of the window tree, window manager has to go through the DC cache to recalculate visible regions for entries whose windows were involved in the operation. DC entries (DCE) can be either private to the window, or private to the window class, or shared between all windows (Windows 3.1 limits the number of shared DCEs to 5).

Messaging subsystem
windows/queue.c windows/message.c

Each Windows task/thread has its own message queue - this is where it gets messages from. Messages can be: 1. generated on the y (WM_PAINT, WM_NCPAINT, WM_TIMER) 2. created by the system (hardware messages) 3. posted by other tasks/threads (PostMessage) 4. sent by other tasks/threads (SendMessage)

Message priority: First the system looks for sent messages, then for posted messages, then for hardware messages, then it checks if the queue has the "dirty window" bit set, and, nally, it checks for expired timers. See windows/message.c. From all these different types of messages, only posted messages go directly into the private message queue. System messages (even in Win95) are rst collected in the system message queue and then they either sit there until Get/PeekMessage gets to process them or, as in Win95, if system queue is getting clobbered, a special thread ("raw input thread") assigns them to the private queues. Sent messages are queued separately and the sender sleeps until it gets a reply. Special messages are generated on the y depending on the window/queue state. If the window update region is not empty, the system sets the QS_PAINT bit in the owning queue and eventually this window receives a WM_PAINT message (WM_NCPAINT too if the update region intersects with the non-client area). A timer event is raised when one of the queue timers expire. Depending on the timer parameters DispatchMessage either calls the callback function or the window procedure. If there are no messages pending the task/thread sleeps until messages appear. There are several tricky moments (open for discussion)

System message order has to be honored and messages should be processed within correct task/thread context. Therefore when Get/PeekMessage encounters unassigned system message and this message appears not to be for the current task/thread it should either skip it (or get rid of it by moving it into the private message queue of the target task/thread - Win95, AFAIK) and look further or roll back and then yield until this message gets processed when system switches to the correct context (Win16). In the rst case we lose correct message ordering, in the second case we have the infamous synchronous system message queue. Here is a post to one of the OS/2 newsgroup I found to be relevant:

Chapter 10. Windowing system

" Heres the problem in a nutshell, and there is no good solution. Every possible solution creates a different problem. With a windowing system, events can go to many different windows. Most are sent by applications or by the OS when things relating to that window happen (like repainting, timers, etc.) Mouse input events go to the window you click on (unless some window captures the mouse). So far, no problem. Whenever an event happens, you put a message on the target windows message queue. Every process has a message queue. If the process queue lls up, the messages back up onto the system queue. This is the rst cause of apps hanging the GUI. If an app doesnt handle messages and they back up into the system queue, other apps cant get any more messages. The reason is that the next message in line cant go anywhere, and the system wont skip over it. This can be xed by making apps have bigger private message queues. The SIQ x does this. PMQSIZE does this for systems without the SIQ x. Applications can also request large queues on their own. Another source of the problem, however, happens when you include keyboard events. When you press a key, theres no easy way to know what window the keystroke message should be delivered to. Most windowing systems use a concept known as "focus". The window with focus gets all incoming keyboard messages. Focus can be changed from window to window by apps or by users clicking on windows. This is the second source of the problem. Suppose window A has focus. You click on window B and start typing before the window gets focus. Where should the keystrokes go? On the one hand, they should go to A until the focus actually changes to B. On the other hand, you probably want the keystrokes to go to B, since you clicked there rst. OS/2s solution is that when a focus-changing event happens (like clicking on a window), OS/2 holds all messages in the system queue until the focus change actually happens. This way, subsequent keystrokes go to the window you clicked on, even if it takes a while for that window to get focus. The downside is that if the window takes a real long time to get focus (maybe its not handling events, or maybe the window losing focus isnt handling events), everything backs up in the system queue and the system appears hung. There are a few solutions to this problem. One is to make focus policy asynchronous. That is, focus changing has absolutely nothing to do with the keyboard. If you click on a window and start typing before the focus actually changes, the keystrokes go to the rst window until focus changes, then they go to the second. This is what X-windows does. Another is what NT does. When focus changes, keyboard events are held in the system message queue, but other events are allowed through. This is "asynchronous" because the messages in the system queue are delivered to the application queues in a different order from that with which they were posted. If a bad app wont handle the "lose focus" message, its of no consequence - the app receiving focus will get its "gain focus" message, and the keystrokes will go to it. The NT solution also takes care of the application queue lling up problem. Since the system delivers messages asynchronously, messages waiting in the system queue will just sit there and the rest of the messages will be delivered to their apps. The OS/2 SIQ solution is this: When a focus-changing event happens, in addition to blocking further messages from the application queues, a timer is started. When the timer goes off, if the focus change has not yet happened, the bad app has its focus taken away and all messages targeted at that window are skipped. When the bad app nally handles the focus change message, OS/2 will detect this and stop skipping its messages. As for the pros and cons: The X-windows solution is probably the easiest. The problem is that users generally dont like having to wait for the focus to change before they start typing. On many occasions, you can type and the characters end up in the wrong window because something (usually heavy system load) is preventing the focus change from happening in a timely manner. The NT solution seems pretty nice, but making the system message queue asynchronous can cause similar problems to the X-windows problem. Since messages can be delivered out of order, programs must not assume that two messages posted in a particular order will be delivered in that same order. This can break legacy apps, but since Win32 always had an asynchronous queue, it is fair to simply tell app designers "dont do that". Its harder to tell app designers something like that on OS/2 - theyll complain "you changed the rules and our apps are breaking."

Chapter 10. Windowing system

The OS/2 solutions problem is that nothing happens until you try to change window focus, and then wait for the timeout. Until then, the bad app is not detected and nothing is done." by David Charlap

Intertask/interthread SendMessage. The system has to inform the target queue about the forthcoming message, then it has to carry out the context switch and wait until the result is available. Win16 stores necessary parameters in the queue structure and then calls DirectedYield() function. However, in Win32 there could be several messages pending sent by preemptively executing threads, and in this case SendMessage has to build some sort of message queue for sent messages. Another issue is what to do with messages sent to the sender when it is blocked inside its own SendMessage.

Accelerators
There are three differently sized accelerator structures exposed to the user: 1. Accelerators in NE resources. This is also the internal layout of the global handle HACCEL (16 and 32) in Windows 95 and Wine. Exposed to the user as Win16 global handles HACCEL16 and HACCEL32 by the Win16/Win32 API. These are 5 bytes long, with no padding:
BYTE WORD WORD fVirt; key; cmd;

2. Accelerators in PE resources. They are exposed to the user only by direct accessing PE resources. These have a size of 8 bytes:
BYTE BYTE WORD WORD WORD fVirt; pad0; key; cmd; pad1;

3. Accelerators in the Win32 API. These are exposed to the user by the CopyAcceleratorTable and CreateAcceleratorTable functions in the Win32 API. These have a size of 6 bytes:
BYTE BYTE WORD WORD fVirt; pad0; key; cmd;

Why two types of accelerators in the Win32 API? We can only guess, but my best bet is that the Win32 resource compiler can/does not handle struct packing. Win32 ACCEL is dened using #pragma(2) for the compiler but without any packing for RC, so it will assume #pragma(4).

X Windows System interface

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Chapter 10. Windowing system

Keyboard mapping
Wine now needs to know about your keyboard layout. This requirement comes from a need from many apps to have the correct scancodes available, since they read these directly, instead of just taking the characters returned by the X server. This means that Wine now needs to have a mapping from X keys to the scancodes these programs expect. On startup, Wine will try to recognize the active X layout by seeing if it matches any of the dened tables. If it does, everything is alright. If not, you need to dene it. To do this, open the le dlls/winex11.drv/keyboard.c and take a look at the existing tables. What you really would need to do, is nd out which scancode each key needs to generate. Find it in the main_key_scan table, which looks like this:
static const int main_key_scan[MAIN_LEN] = { /* this is my (102-key) keyboard layout, sorry if it doesnt quite match yours */ 0x29,0x02,0x03,0x04,0x05,0x06,0x07,0x08,0x09,0x0A,0x0B,0x0C,0x0D, 0x10,0x11,0x12,0x13,0x14,0x15,0x16,0x17,0x18,0x19,0x1A,0x1B, 0x1E,0x1F,0x20,0x21,0x22,0x23,0x24,0x25,0x26,0x27,0x28,0x2B, 0x2C,0x2D,0x2E,0x2F,0x30,0x31,0x32,0x33,0x34,0x35, 0x56 /* the 102nd key (actually to the right of l-shift) */ };

Next, assign each scancode the characters imprinted on the keycaps. This was done (sort of) for the US 101-key keyboard, which you can nd near the top in keyboard.c. It also shows that if there is no 102nd key, you can skip that. However, for most international 102-key keyboards, we have done it easy for you. The scancode layout for these already pretty much matches the physical layout in the main_key_scan, so all you need to do is to go through all the keys that generate characters on your main keyboard (except spacebar), and stuff those into an appropriate table. The only exception is that the 102nd key, which is usually to the left of the rst key of the last line (usually Z), must be placed on a separate line after the last line. After you have written such a table, you need to add it to the main_key_tab[] layout index table. This will look like this:
static struct { WORD lang, ansi_codepage, oem_codepage; const char (*key)[MAIN_LEN][4]; } main_key_tab[]={ ... ... {MAKELANGID(LANG_NORWEGIAN,SUBLANG_DEFAULT), ...

1252, 865, &main_key_NO},

After you have added your table, recompile Wine and test that it works. If it fails to detect your table, try running
WINEDEBUG=+key,+keyboard wine > key.log 2>&1

and look in the resulting key.log le to nd the error messages it gives for your layout. Note that the LANG_* and SUBLANG_* denitions are in include/winnls.h, which you might need to know to nd out which numbers your language is assigned, and nd it in the WINEDEBUG output. The numbers will be (SUBLANG * 0x400 + LANG), so, for example the combination LANG_NORWEGIAN (0x14) and SUBLANG_DEFAULT (0x1) will be (in hex) 14 + 1*400 = 414, so since Im Norwegian, I could look for 0414 in the WINEDEBUG output to nd out why my keyboard wont detect.

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Chapter 11. COM in Wine

Writing COM Components for Wine
This section describes how to create your own natively compiled COM components.

Macros to dene a COM interface

The goal of the following set of denitions is to provide a way to use the same header le denitions to provide both a C interface and a C++ object oriented interface to COM interfaces. The type of interface is selected automatically depending on the language but it is always possible to get the C interface in C++ by dening CINTERFACE. It is based on the following assumptions:

all COM interfaces derive from IUnknown, this should not be a problem. the header le only denes the interface, the actual elds are dened separately in the C le implementing the interface.

The natural approach to this problem would be to make sure we get a C++ class and virtual methods in C++ and a structure with a table of pointer to functions in C. Unfortunately the layout of the virtual table is compiler specic, the layout of g++ virtual tables is not the same as that of an egcs virtual table which is not the same as that generated by Visual C++. There are work arounds to make the virtual tables compatible via padding but unfortunately the one which is imposed to the Wine emulator by the Windows binaries, i.e. the Visual C++ one, is the most compact of all. So the solution I nally adopted does not use virtual tables. Instead I use in-line non virtual methods that dereference the method pointer themselves and perform the call. Lets take Direct3D as an example:
#define ICOM_INTERFACE IDirect3D #define IDirect3D_METHODS \ ICOM_METHOD1(HRESULT,Initialize, REFIID,) \ ICOM_METHOD2(HRESULT,EnumDevices, LPD3DENUMDEVICESCALLBACK LPVOID,) \ ICOM_METHOD2(HRESULT,CreateLight, LPDIRECT3DLIGHT* IUnknown*,) \ ICOM_METHOD2(HRESULT,CreateMaterial,LPDIRECT3DMATERIAL* IUnknown*,) \ ICOM_METHOD2(HRESULT,CreateViewport,LPDIRECT3DVIEWPORT* IUnknown*,) \ ICOM_METHOD2(HRESULT,FindDevice, LPD3DFINDDEVICESEARCH LPD3DFINDDEVICERESULT,) #define IDirect3D_IMETHODS \ IUnknown_IMETHODS \ IDirect3D_METHODS ICOM_DEFINE(IDirect3D,IUnknown) #undef ICOM_INTERFACE #ifdef ICOM_CINTERFACE // *** IUnknown methods *** // #define IDirect3D_QueryInterface(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_AddRef(p) #define IDirect3D_Release(p) // *** IDirect3D methods *** // #define IDirect3D_Initialize(p,a) #define IDirect3D_EnumDevices(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_CreateLight(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_CreateMaterial(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_CreateViewport(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_FindDevice(p,a,b)

ICOM_CALL2(QueryInterface,p,a,b) ICOM_CALL (AddRef,p) ICOM_CALL (Release,p) ICOM_CALL1(Initialize,p,a) ICOM_CALL2(EnumDevice,p,a,b) ICOM_CALL2(CreateLight,p,a,b) ICOM_CALL2(CreateMaterial,p,a,b) ICOM_CALL2(CreateViewport,p,a,b) ICOM_CALL2(FindDevice,p,a,b)

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Chapter 11. COM in Wine

#endif

Comments: The ICOM_INTERFACE macro is used in the ICOM_METHOD macros to dene the type of the this pointer. Dening this macro here saves us the trouble of having to repeat the interface name everywhere. Note however that because of the way macros work, a macro like ICOM_METHOD1 cannot use ICOM_INTERFACE##_VTABLE because this would give ICOM_INTERFACE_VTABLE and not IDirect3D_VTABLE. ICOM_METHODS denes the methods specic to this interface. It is then aggregated with the inherited methods to form ICOM_IMETHODS. ICOM_IMETHODS denes the list of methods that are inheritable from this interface. It must be written manually (rather than using a macro to generate the equivalent code) to avoid macro recursion (which compilers dont like). The ICOM_DEFINE nally declares all the structures necessary for the interface. We have to explicitly use the interface name for macro expansion reasons again. Inherited methods are inherited in C by using the IDirect3D_METHODS macro and the parents Xxx_IMETHODS macro. In C++ we need only use the IDirect3D_METHODS since method inheritance is taken care of by the language. In C++ the ICOM_METHOD macros generate a function prototype and a call to a function pointer method. This means using once t1 p1, t2 p2, ... and once p1, p2 without the types. The only way I found to handle this is to have one ICOM_METHOD macro per number of parameters and to have it take only the type information (with const if necessary) as parameters. The undef ICOM_INTERFACE is here to remind you that using ICOM_INTERFACE in the following macros will not work. This time its because the ICOM_CALL macro expansion is done only once the IDirect3D_Xxx macro is expanded. And by that time ICOM_INTERFACE will be long gone anyway. You may have noticed the double commas after each parameter type. This allows you to put the name of that parameter which I think is good for documentation. It is not required and since I did not know what to put there for this example (I could only nd doc about IDirect3D2), I left them blank. Finally the set of IDirect3D_Xxx macros is a standard set of macros dened to ease access to the interface methods in C. Unfortunately I dont see any way to avoid having to duplicate the inherited method denitions there. This time I could have used a trick to use only one macro whatever the number of parameters but I preferred to have it work the same way as above. You probably have noticed that we dont dene the elds we need to actually implement this interface: reference count, pointer to other resources and miscellaneous elds. Thats because these interfaces are just that: interfaces. They may be implemented more than once, in different contexts and sometimes not even in Wine. Thus it would not make sense to impose that the interface contains some specic elds.

Bindings in C
In C this gives:
typedef struct IDirect3DVtbl IDirect3DVtbl; struct IDirect3D { IDirect3DVtbl* lpVtbl; }; struct IDirect3DVtbl { HRESULT (*fnQueryInterface)(IDirect3D* me, REFIID riid, LPVOID* ppvObj); ULONG (*fnAddRef)(IDirect3D* me); ULONG (*fnRelease)(IDirect3D* me); HRESULT (*fnInitialize)(IDirect3D* me, REFIID a); HRESULT (*fnEnumDevices)(IDirect3D* me, LPD3DENUMDEVICESCALLBACK a, LPVOID b); HRESULT (*fnCreateLight)(IDirect3D* me, LPDIRECT3DLIGHT* a, IUnknown* b); HRESULT (*fnCreateMaterial)(IDirect3D* me, LPDIRECT3DMATERIAL* a, IUnknown* b); HRESULT (*fnCreateViewport)(IDirect3D* me, LPDIRECT3DVIEWPORT* a, IUnknown* b); HRESULT (*fnFindDevice)(IDirect3D* me, LPD3DFINDDEVICESEARCH a, LPD3DFINDDEVICERESULT b);

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}; #ifdef ICOM_CINTERFACE // *** IUnknown methods *** // #define IDirect3D_QueryInterface(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_AddRef(p) #define IDirect3D_Release(p) // *** IDirect3D methods *** // #define IDirect3D_Initialize(p,a) #define IDirect3D_EnumDevices(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_CreateLight(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_CreateMaterial(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_CreateViewport(p,a,b) #define IDirect3D_FindDevice(p,a,b) #endif

(p)->lpVtbl->fnQueryInterface(p,a,b) (p)->lpVtbl->fnAddRef(p) (p)->lpVtbl->fnRelease(p) (p)->lpVtbl->fnInitialize(p,a) (p)->lpVtbl->fnEnumDevice(p,a,b) (p)->lpVtbl->fnCreateLight(p,a,b) (p)->lpVtbl->fnCreateMaterial(p,a,b) (p)->lpVtbl->fnCreateViewport(p,a,b) (p)->lpVtbl->fnFindDevice(p,a,b)

Comments: IDirect3D only contains a pointer to the IDirect3D virtual/jump table. This is the only thing the user needs to know to use the interface. Of course the structure we will dene to implement this interface will have more elds but the rst one will match this pointer. The code generated by ICOM_DEFINE denes both the structure representing the interface and the structure for the jump table. ICOM_DEFINE uses the parents Xxx_IMETHODS macro to automatically repeat the prototypes of all the inherited methods and then uses IDirect3D_METHODS to dene the IDirect3D methods. Each method is declared as a pointer to function eld in the jump table. The implementation will ll this jump table with appropriate values, probably using a static variable, and initialize the lpVtbl eld to point to this variable. The IDirect3D_Xxx macros then just dereference the lpVtbl pointer and use the function pointer corresponding to the macro name. This emulates the behavior of a virtual table and should be just as fast. This C code should be quite compatible with the Windows headers both for code that uses COM interfaces and for code implementing a COM interface.

Bindings in C++
And in C++ (with gccs g++):

typedef struct IDirect3D: public IUnknown { private: HRESULT (*fnInitialize)(IDirect3D* me, REFIID a); public: inline HRESULT Initialize(REFIID a) { return ((IDirect3D*)t.lpVtbl)->fnInitialize(this private: HRESULT (*fnEnumDevices)(IDirect3D* me, LPD3DENUMDEVICESCALLBACK a, LPVOID b); public: inline HRESULT EnumDevices(LPD3DENUMDEVICESCALLBACK a, LPVOID b) { return ((IDirect3D*)t.lpVtbl)->fnEnumDevices(this,a,b); }; private: HRESULT (*fnCreateLight)(IDirect3D* me, LPDIRECT3DLIGHT* a, IUnknown* b); public: inline HRESULT CreateLight(LPDIRECT3DLIGHT* a, IUnknown* b) { return ((IDirect3D*)t.lpVtbl)->fnCreateLight(this,a,b); }; private: HRESULT (*fnCreateMaterial)(IDirect3D* me, LPDIRECT3DMATERIAL* a, IUnknown* b); public: inline HRESULT CreateMaterial(LPDIRECT3DMATERIAL* a, IUnknown* b) { return ((IDirect3D*)t.lpVtbl)->fnCreateMaterial(this,a,b); }; private: HRESULT (*fnCreateViewport)(IDirect3D* me, LPDIRECT3DVIEWPORT* a, IUnknown* b); public: inline HRESULT CreateViewport(LPDIRECT3DVIEWPORT* a, IUnknown* b) { return ((IDirect3D*)t.lpVtbl)->fnCreateViewport(this,a,b); }; private: HRESULT (*fnFindDevice)(IDirect3D* me, LPD3DFINDDEVICESEARCH a, LPD3DFINDDEVICERESUL public: inline HRESULT FindDevice(LPD3DFINDDEVICESEARCH a, LPD3DFINDDEVICERESULT b) { return ((IDirect3D*)t.lpVtbl)->fnFindDevice(this,a,b); }; };

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Comments: In C++ IDirect3D does double duty as both the virtual/jump table and as the interface denition. The reason for this is to avoid having to duplicate the method denitions: once to have the function pointers in the jump table and once to have the methods in the interface class. Here one macro can generate both. This means though that the rst pointer, t.lpVtbl dened in IUnknown, must be interpreted as the jump table pointer if we interpret the structure as the interface class, and as the function pointer to the QueryInterface method, t.fnQueryInterface, if we interpret the structure as the jump table. Fortunately this gymnastic is entirely taken care of in the header of IUnknown. Of course in C++ we use inheritance so that we dont have to duplicate the method denitions. Since IDirect3D does double duty, each ICOM_METHOD macro denes both a function pointer and a non-virtual inline method which dereferences it and calls it. This way this method behaves just like a virtual method but does not create a true C++ virtual table which would break the structure layout. If you look at the implementation of these methods youll notice that they would not work for void functions. We have to return something and fortunately this seems to be what all the COM methods do (otherwise we would need another set of macros). Note how the ICOM_METHOD generates both function prototypes mixing types and formal parameter names and the method invocation using only the formal parameter name. This is the reason why we need different macros to handle different numbers of parameters. Finally there is no IDirect3D_Xxx macro. These are not needed in C++ unless the CINTERFACE macro is dened in which case we would not be here. This C++ code works well for code that just uses COM interfaces. But it will not work with C++ code implement a COM interface. Thats because such code assumes the interface methods are declared as virtual C++ methods which is not the case here.

Implementing a COM interface.

This continues the above example. This example assumes that the implementation is in C.
typedef struct _IDirect3D { void* lpVtbl; // ... } _IDirect3D; static ICOM_VTABLE(IDirect3D) d3dvt; // implement the IDirect3D methods here int IDirect3D_fnQueryInterface(IDirect3D* me) { ICOM_THIS(IDirect3D,me); // ... } // ... static ICOM_VTABLE(IDirect3D) d3dvt = { ICOM_MSVTABLE_COMPAT_DummyRTTIVALUE IDirect3D_fnQueryInterface, IDirect3D_fnAdd, IDirect3D_fnAdd2, IDirect3D_fnInitialize, IDirect3D_fnSetWidth };

Comments:

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We rst dene what the interface really contains. This is the _IDirect3D structure. The rst eld must of course be the virtual table pointer. Everything else is free. Then we predeclare our static virtual table variable, we will need its address in some methods to initialize the virtual table pointer of the returned interface objects. Then we implement the interface methods. To match what has been declared in the header le they must take a pointer to an IDirect3D structure and we must cast it to an _IDirect3D so that we can manipulate the elds. This is performed by the ICOM_THIS macro. Finally we initialize the virtual table.

A brief introduction to DCOM in Wine

This section explains the basic principles behind DCOM remoting as used by InstallShield and others.

Basics
The basic idea behind DCOM is to take a COM object and make it location transparent. That means you can use it from other threads, processes and machines without having to worry about the fact that you cant just dereference the interface vtable pointer to call methods on it. You might be wondering about putting threads next to processes and machines in that last paragraph. You can access thread safe objects from multiple threads without DCOM normally, right? Why would you need RPC magic to do that? The answer is of course that COM doesnt assume that objects actually are thread-safe. Most real-world objects arent, in fact, for various reasons. What these reasons are isnt too important here, though; its just important to realize that the problem of thread-unsafe objects is what COM tries hard to solve with its apartment model. There are also ways to tell COM that your object is truly thread-safe (namely the free-threaded marshaller). In general, no object is truly thread-safe if it could potentially use another not so thread-safe object, though, so the free-threaded marshaller is less used than youd think. For now, sufce it to say that COM lets you "marshal" interfaces into other "apartments". An apartment (you may see it referred to as a context in modern versions of COM) can be thought of as a location, and contains objects. Every thread in a program that uses COM exists in an apartment. If a thread wishes to use an object from another apartment, marshalling and the whole DCOM infrastructure gets involved to make that happen behind the scenes. So. Each COM object resides in an apartment, and each apartment resides in a process, and each process resides in a machine, and each machine resides in a network. Allowing those objects to be used from any of these different places is what DCOM is all about. The process of marshalling refers to taking a function call in an apartment and actually performing it in another apartment. Lets say you have two machines, A and B, and on machine B there is an object sitting in a DLL on the hard disk. You want to create an instance of that object (activate it) and use it as if you had compiled it into your own program. This is hard, because the remote object is expecting to be called by code in its own address space - it may do things like accept pointers to linked lists and even return other objects. Very basic marshalling is easy enough to understand. You take a method on a remote interface (that is a COM interface that is implemented on the remote computer), copy each of its parameters into a buffer, and send it to the remote computer. On the other end, the remote server reads each parameter from the buffer, calls the method, writes the result into another buffer and sends it back. The tricky part is exactly how to encode those parameters in the buffer, and how to convert standard stdcall/cdecl method calls to network packets and back again. This is the job of the RPCRT4.DLL le - or the Remote Procedure Call Runtime.

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The backbone of DCOM is this RPC runtime, which is an implementation of DCE RPC (http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009629399/toc.htm). DCE RPC is not naturally object oriented, so this protocol is extended with some new constructs and by assigning new meanings to some of the packet elds, to produce ORPC or Object RPC. You might see it called MS-RPC as well. RPC packets contain a buffer containing marshalled data in NDR format. NDR is short for "Network Data Representation" and is similar to the XDR format used in SunRPC (the closest native equivalent on Linux to DCE RPC). NDR/XDR are all based on the idea of graph serialization and were worked out during the 80s, meaning they are very powerful and can do things like marshal doubly linked lists and other rather tricky structures. In Wine, our DCOM implementation is not currently based on the RPC runtime, as while few programs use DCOM even fewer use RPC directly so it was developed some time after OLE32/OLEAUT32 were. Eventually this will have to be xed, otherwise our DCOM will never be compatible with Microsofts. Bear this in mind as you read through the code however.

Proxies and Stubs

Manually marshalling and unmarshalling each method call using the NDR APIs (NdrConformantArrayMarshall etc) is very tedious work, so the Platform SDK ships with a tool called "midl" which is an IDL compiler. IDL or the "Interface Denition Language" is a tool designed specically for describing interfaces in a reasonably language neutral fashion, though in reality it bears a close resemblence to C++. By describing the functions you want to expose via RPC in IDL therefore, it becomes possible to pass this le to MIDL which spits out a huge amount of C source code. That code denes functions which have the same prototype as the functions described in your IDL but which internally take each argument, marshal it using Ndr, send the packet, and unmarshal the return. Because this code proxies the code from the client to the server, the functions are called proxies. Easy, right? Of course, in the RPC server process at the other end, you need some way to unmarshal the RPCs, so you have functions also generated by MIDL which are the inverse of the proxies; they accept an NDR buffer, extract the parameters, call the real function and then marshal the result back. They are called stubs, and stand in for the real calling code in the client process. The sort of marshalling/unmarshalling code that MIDL spits out can be seen in dlls/oleaut32/oaidl_p.c - its not exactly what it would look like as that le contains DCOM proxies/stubs which are different, but you get the idea. Proxy functions take the arguments and feed them to the NDR marshallers (or picklers), invoke an NdrProxySendReceive and then convert the out parameters and return code. Theres a ton of goop in there for dealing with buffer allocation, exceptions and so on - its really ugly code. But, this is the basic concept behind DCE RPC.

Interface Marshalling
Standard NDR only knows about C style function calls - they can accept and even return structures, but it has no concept of COM interfaces. Confusingly DCE RPC does have a concept of RPC interfaces which are just convenient ways to bundle function calls together into namespaces, but lets ignore that for now as it just muddies the water. The primary extension made by Microsoft to NDR then was the ability to take a COM interface pointer and marshal that into the NDR stream. The basic theory of proxies and stubs and IDL is still here, but its been modied slightly. Whereas before you could dene a bunch of functions in IDL, now a new "object" keyword has appeared. This tells MIDL that youre describing a COM interface, and as a result the proxies/stubs it generates are also COM objects. Thats a very important distinction. When you make a call to a remote COM object you do it via a proxy object that COM has constructed on the y. Likewise, a stub object on the remote end unpacks the RPC packet and makes the call.

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Because this is object-oriented RPC, there are a few complications: for instance, a call that goes via the same proxies/stubs may end up at a different object instance, so the RPC runtime keeps track of "this" and "that" in the RPC packets. This leads naturally onto the question of how we got those proxy/stub objects in the rst place, and where they came from. You can use the CoCreateInstanceEx API to activate COM objects on a remote machine, this works like CoCreateInstance API. Behind the scenes, a lot of stuff is involved to do this (like IRemoteActivation, IOXIDResolver and so on) but lets gloss over that for now. When DCOM creates an object on a remote machine, the DCOM runtime on that machine activates the object in the usual way (by looking it up in the registry etc) and then marshals the requested interface back to the client. Marshalling an interface takes a pointer, and produces a buffer containing all the information DCOM needs to construct a proxy object in the client, a stub object in the server and link the two together. The structure of a marshalled interface pointer is somewhat complex. Lets ignore that too. The important thing is how COM proxies/stubs are loaded.

COM Proxy/Stub System

COM proxies are objects that implement both the interfaces needing to be proxied and also IRpcProxyBuffer. Likewise, COM stubs implement IRpcStubBuffer and understand how to invoke the methods of the requested interface. You may be wondering what the word "buffer" is doing in those interface names. Im not sure either, except that a running theme in DCOM is that interfaces which have nothing to do with buffers have the word Buffer appended to them, seemingly at random. Ignore it and dont let it confuse you :) This stuff is convoluted enough ... The IRpc[Proxy/Stub]Buffer interfaces are used to control the proxy/stub objects and are one of the many semi-public interfaces used in DCOM. DCOM is theoretically an internet RFC and is specced out, but in reality the only implementation of it apart from ours is Microsofts, and as a result there are lots of interfaces which can be used if you want to customize or control DCOM but in practice are badly documented or not documented at all, or exist mostly as interfaces between MIDL generated code and COM itself. Dont pay too much attention to the MSDN denitions of these interfaces and APIs. COM proxies and stubs are like any other normal COM object - they are registered in the registry, they can be loaded with CoCreateInstance and so on. They have to be in process (in DLLs) however. They arent activated directly by COM however, instead the process goes something like this:

COM receives a marshalled interface packet, and retrieves the IID of the marshalled interface from it COM looks in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Interface/{whatever-iid}/ProxyStubClsId32 to retrieve the CLSID of another COM object, which implements IPSFactoryBuffer. IPSFactoryBuffer has only two methods, CreateProxy and CreateStub. COM calls whichever is appropriate: CreateStub for the server, CreateProxy for the client. MIDL will normally provide an implementation of this object for you in the code it generates.

Once CreateProxy has been called, the resultant object is QueryInterfaced to IRpcProxyBuffer, which only has 1 method, IRpcProxyBuffer::Connect. This method only takes one parameter, the IRpcChannelBuffer object which encapsulates the "RPC Channel" between the client and server. On the server side, a similar process is performed - the PSFactoryBuffer is created, CreateStub is called, result is QId to IRpcStubBuffer, and IRpcStubBuffer::Connect is used to link it to the RPC channel.

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RPC Channels
Remember the RPC runtime? Well, thats not just responsible for marshalling stuff, it also controls the connection and protocols between the client and server. We can ignore the details of this for now, sufce it to say that an RPC Channel is a COM object that implements IRpcChannelBuffer, and its basically an abstraction of different RPC methods. For instance, in the case of inter-thread marshalling (not covered here) the RPC connection code isnt used, only the NDR marshallers are, so IRpcChannelBuffer in that case isnt actually implemented by RPCRT4 but rather just by the COM/OLE DLLS. On this topic, Ove Kaaven says: It depends on the Windows version, I think. Windows 95 and Windows NT 4 certainly had very different models when I looked. Im pretty sure the Windows 98 version of RPCRT4 was able to dispatch messages directly to individual apartments. Id be surprised if some similar functionality was not added to Windows 2000. After all, if an object on machine A wanted to use an object on machine B in an apartment C, wouldnt it be most efcient if the RPC system knew about apartments and could dispatch the message directly to it? And if RPC does know how to efciently dispatch to apartments, why should COM duplicate this functionality? There were, however, no unied way to tell RPC about them across Windows versions, so in that old patch of mine, I let the COM/OLE dlls do the apartment dispatch, but even then, the RPC runtime was always involved. After all, it could be quite tricky to tell whether the call is merely interthread, without involving the RPC runtime... RPC channels are constructed on the y by DCOM as part of the marshalling process. So, when you make a call on a COM proxy, it goes like this: Your code -> COM proxy object -> RPC Channel -> COM stub object -> Their code

How this actually works in Wine

Right now, Wine does not use the NDR marshallers or RPC to implement its DCOM. When you marshal an interface in Wine, in the server process a _StubMgrThread thread is started. I havent gone into the stub manager here. The important thing is that eventually a _StubReaderThread is started which accepts marshalled DCOM RPCs, and then passes them to IRpcStubBuffer::Invoke on the correct stub object which in turn demarshals the packet and performs the call. The threads started by our implementation of DCOM are never terminated, they just hang around until the process dies. Remember that I said our DCOM doesnt use RPC? Well, you might be thinking "but we use IRpcStubBuffer like were supposed to ... isnt that provided by MIDL which generates code that uses the NDR APIs?". If so pat yourself on the back, youre still with me. Go get a cup of coffee.

Typelib Marshaller
In fact, the reason for the PSFactoryBuffer layer of indirection is because not all interfaces are marshalled using MIDL generated code. Why not? Well, to understand that you have to see that one of the driving forces behind OLE and by extension DCOM was the development of Visual Basic. Microsoft wanted VB developers to be rst class citizens in the COM world, but things like writing IDL and compiling them with a C compiler into DLLs wasnt easy enough. So, type libraries were invented. Actually they were invented as part of a parallel line of COM development known as "OLE Automation", but lets not get into that here. Type libraries are basically binary IDL les, except that despite there being two type library formats neither of them can fully express everything expressable in IDL. Anyway, with a type library (which can be embedded as a resource into a DLL) you have another option beyond compiling MIDL output - you can set the ProxyStubClsId32 registry entry for your interfaces to the CLSID of the "type library marshaller" or "universal marshaller". Both terms are used, but in the Wine source its called the typelib marshaller. The type library marshaller constructs proxy and stub objects on the y. It does so by having generic marshalling glue which reads the information from the type libraries, and takes the parameters directly off the stack. The

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CreateProxy method actually builds a vtable out of blocks of assembly stitched together which pass control to _xCall, which then does the marshalling. You can see all this magic in dlls/oleaut32/tmarshal.c In the case of InstallShield, it actually comes with typelibs for all the interfaces it needs to marshal (xme: is this right?), but they actually use a mix of MIDL and typelib marshalling. In order to cover up for the fact that we dont really use RPC theyre all forced to go via the typelib marshaller - thats what the 1 || hack is for and what the "Registering non-automation type library!" warning is about (I think).

Apartments
Before a thread can use COM it must enter an apartment. Apartments are an abstraction of a COM objects thread safety level. There are many types of apartment but the only two we care about right now are single threaded apartments (STAs) and the multi-threaded apartment (MTA). Any given process may contain at most one MTA and potentially many STAs. This is because all objects in MTAs never care where they are invoked from and hence can all be treated the same. Since objects in STAs do care, they cannot be treated the same. You enter an apartment by calling CoInitializeEx() and passing the desired thread model in as a parameter. The default if you use the deprecated CoInitialize() is a STA, and this is the most common type of apartment used in COM. An object in the multi-threaded apartment may be accessed concurrently by multiple threads: eg, its supposed to be entirely thread safe. It must also not care about thread-afnity, the object should react the same way no matter which thread is calling it. An object inside a STA does not have to be thread safe, and all calls upon it should come from the same thread - the thread that entered the apartment in the rst place. The apartment system was originally designed to deal with the disparity between the Windows NT/C++ world in which threading was given a strong emphasis, and the Visual Basic world in which threading was barely supported and even if it had been fully supported most developers would not have used it. Visual Basic code is not truly multi-threaded, instead if you start a new thread you get an entirely new VM, with separate sets of global variables. Changes made in one thread do not reect in another, which pretty much violates the expected semantics of multi-threading entirely but this is Visual Basic, so what did you expect? If you access a VB object concurrently from multiple threads, behind the scenes each VM runs in a STA and the calls are marshaled between the threads using DCOM. In the Windows 2000 release of COM, several new types of apartment were added, the most important of which are RTAs (the rental threaded apartment) in which concurrent access are serialised by COM using an apartment-wide lock but thread afnity is not guaranteed.

Structure of a marshaled interface pointer

When an interface is marshaled using CoMarshalInterface(), the result is a serialized OBJREF structure. An OBJREF actually contains a union, but well be assuming the variant that embeds a STDOBJREF here which is whats used by the system provided standard marshaling. A STDOBJREF (standard object reference) consists of the magic signature MEOW, then some ags, then the IID of the marshaled interface. Quite what MEOW stands for is a mystery, but its denitely not "Microsoft Extended Object Wire". Next comes the STDOBJREF ags, identied by their SORF_ prex. Most of these are reserved, and their purpose (if any) is unknown, but a few are dened. After the SORF ags comes a count of the references represented by this marshaled interface. Typically this will be 5 in the case of a normal marshal, but may be 0 for table-strong and table-weak marshals (the difference between these is explained below). The reasoning is this: In the general case, we want to know exactly when an object is unmarshaled and released, so we can accurately control the lifetime of the stub object. This is what happens when cPublicRefs is zero. However, in many cases, we only want to unmarshal an object once. Therefore, if we strengthen

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the rules to say when marshaling that we will only unmarshal once, then we no longer have to know when it is unmarshaled. Therefore, we can give out an arbitrary number of references when marshaling and basically say "dont call me, except when you die." The most interesting part of a STDOBJREF is the OXID, OID, IPID triple. This triple identies any given marshaled interface pointer in the network. OXIDs are apartment identiers, and are supposed to be unique network-wide. How this is guaranteed is currently unknown: the original algorithm Windows used was something like the current UNIX time and a local counter. OXIDs are generated and registered with the OXID resolver by performing local RPCs to the RPC subsystem (rpcss.exe). In a fully security-patched Windows system they appear to be randomly generated. This registration is done using the ILocalOxidResolver interface, however the exact structure of this interface is currently unknown. OIDs are object identiers, and identify a stub manager. The stub manager manages interface stubs. For each exported COM object there are multiple interfaces and therefore multiple interface stubs (IRpcStubBuffer implementations). OIDs are apartment scoped. Each ifstub is identied by an IPID, which identies a marshaled interface pointer. IPIDs are apartment scoped. Unmarshaling one of these streams therefore means setting up a connection to the object exporter (the apartment holding the marshaled interface pointer) and being able to send RPCs to the right ifstub. Each apartment has its own RPC endpoint and calls can be routed to the correct interface pointer by embedding the IPID into the call using RpcBindingSetObject. IRemUnknown, discussed below, uses a reserved IPID. Please note that this is true only in the current implementation. The native version generates an IPID as per any other object and simply noties the SCM of this IPID. Both standard and handler marshaled OBJREFs contains an OXID resolver endpoint which is an RPC string binding in a DUALSTRINGARRAY. This is necessary because an OXID alone is not enough to contact the host, as it doesnt contain any network address data. Instead, the combination of the remote OXID resolver RPC endpoint and the OXID itself are passed to the local OXID resolver. It then returns the apartment string binding. This step is an optimisation: technically the OBJREF itself could contain the string binding of the apartment endpoint and the OXID resolver could be bypassed, but by using this DCOM can optimise out a server round-trip by having the local OXID resolver cache the query results. The OXID resolver is a service in the RPC subsystem (rpcss.exe) which implements a raw (non object-oriented) RPC interface called IOXIDResolver. Despite the identical naming convention this is not a COM interface. Unmarshaling an interface pointer stream therefore consists of reading the OXID, OID and IPID from the STDOBJREF, then reading one or more RPC string bindings for the remote OXID resolver. Then RpcBindingFromStringBinding is used to convert this remote string binding into an RPC binding handle which can be passed to the local IOXIDResolver::ResolveOxid implementation along with the OXID. The local OXID resolver consults its list of same-machine OXIDs, then its cache of remote OXIDs, and if not found does an RPC to the remote OXID resolver using the binding handle passed in earlier. The result of the query is stored for future reference in the cache, and nally the unmarshaling application gets back the apartment string binding, the IPID of that apartments IRemUnknown implementation, and a security hint (lets ignore this for now). Once the remote apartments string binding has been located the unmarshalling process constructs an RPC Channel Buffer implementation with the connection handle and the IPID of the needed interface, loads and constructs the IRpcProxyBuffer implementation for that IID and connects it to the channel. Finally the proxy is passed back to the application.

Handling IUnknown
There are some subtleties here with respect to IUnknown. IUnknown itself is never marshaled directly: instead a version of it optimised for network usage is used. IRemUnknown is similar in concept to IUnknown except that it allows you to add and release arbitrary numbers of references at once, and it also allows you to query for multiple interfaces at once.

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IRemUnknown is used for lifecycle management, and for marshaling new interfaces on an object back to the client. Its denition can be seen in dcom.idl - basically the IRemUnknown::RemQueryInterface method takes an IPID and a list of IIDs, then returns STDOBJREFs of each new marshaled interface pointer. There is one IRemUnknown implementation per apartment, not per stub manager as you might expect. This is OK because IPIDs are apartment not object scoped (In fact, according to the DCOM draft spec, they are machine-scoped, but this implies apartment-scoped).

Table marshaling
Normally once you have unmarshaled a marshaled interface pointer that stream is dead, you cant unmarshal it again. Sometimes this isnt what you want. In this case, table marshaling can be used. There are two types: strong and weak. In table-strong marshaling, selected by a specic ag to CoMarshalInterface(), a stream can be unmarshaled as many times as you like. Even if all the proxies are released, the marshaled object reference is still valid. Effectively the stream itself holds a ref on the object. To release the object entirely so its server can shut down, you must use CoReleaseMarshalData() on the stream. In table-weak marshaling the stream can be unmarshaled many times, however the stream does not hold a ref. If you unmarshal the stream twice, once those two proxies have been released remote object will also be released. Attempting to unmarshal the stream at this point will yield CO_E_DISCONNECTED.

RPC dispatch
Exactly how RPC dispatch occurs depends on whether the exported object is in a STA or the MTA. If its in the MTA then all is simple: the RPC dispatch thread can temporarily enter the MTA, perform the remote call, and then leave it again. If its in a STA things get more complex, because of the requirement that only one thread can ever access the object. Instead, when entering a STA a hidden window is created implicitly by COM, and the user must manually pump the message loop in order to service incoming RPCs. The RPC dispatch thread performs the context switch into the STA by sending a message to the apartments window, which then proceeds to invoke the remote call in the right thread. RPC dispatch threads are pooled by the RPC runtime. When an incoming RPC needs to be serviced, a thread is pulled from the pool and invokes the call. The main RPC thread then goes back to listening for new calls. Its quite likely for objects in the MTA to therefore be servicing more than one call at once.

Message ltering and re-entrancy

When an outgoing call is made from a STA, its possible that the remote server will re-enter the client, for instance to perform a callback. Because of this potential re-entrancy, when waiting for the reply to an RPC made inside a STA, COM will pump the message loop. Thats because while this thread is blocked, the incoming callback will be dispatched by a thread from the RPC dispatch pool, so it must be processing messages. While COM is pumping the message loop, all incoming messages from the operating system are ltered through one or more message lters. These lters are themselves COM objects which can choose to discard, hold or forward window messages. The default message lter drops all input messages and forwards the rest. This is so that if the user chooses a menu option which triggers an RPC, they then cannot choose that menu option *again* and restart the function from the beginning. That type of unexpected re-entrancy is extremely difcult to debug, so its disallowed. Unfortunately other window messages are allowed through, meaning that its possible your UI will be required to repaint itself during an outgoing RPC. This makes programming with STAs more complex than it may appear, as you must be prepared to run all kinds of code any time an outgoing call is made. In turn this breaks the idea that COM should abstract object location from the programmer, because an object that was originally free-threaded and is then run from a STA could trigger new and untested codepaths in a program.

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Wrapup
Theres are still a lot of topics that have not been covered:

Format strings/MOPs IRemoteActivation Complex/simple pings, distributed garbage collection Marshalling IDispatch ICallFrame Interface pointer swizzling Runtime class object registration (CoRegisterClassObject), ROT Exactly how InstallShield uses DCOM

Further Reading
Most of these documents assume you have knowledge only contained in other documents. You may have to reread them a few times for it all to make sense. Dont feel you need to read these to understand DCOM, you dont, you only need to look at them if youre planning to help implement it.

http://www-csag.ucsd.edu/individual/achien/cs491-f97/projects/dcom-writeup.ps (http://www-csag.ucsd.edu/individual/achien/cs491-f97/projects/dcom-writeup.ps) http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/htm/cmi_n2p_459u.asp (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/htm/cmi_n2p_459u.asp) http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/htm/cmi_q2z_5ygi.asp (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/htm/cmi_q2z_5ygi.asp) http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0398/dcom.aspx (http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0398/dcom.aspx) http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/techresources/appserv/COM/DCOM/4_ConnectionMgmt.asp (http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/techresources/appserv/COM/DCOM/4_ConnectionMgmt.asp) http://www.idevresource.com/com/library/articles/comonlinux.asp (http://www.idevresource.com/com/library/articles/comonlinux.asp) (unfortunately part 2 of this article does not seem to exist anymore, if it was ever written)

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What is needed to have OpenGL support in Wine
Basically, if you have a Linux OpenGL ABI compliant libGL ( http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ABI/ (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ABI/)) installed on your computer, you should have everything that is needed. To be more clear, I will detail one step after another what the congure script checks. If, after Wine compiles, OpenGL support is not compiled in, you can always check config.log to see which of the following points failed.

Header les
The needed header les to build OpenGL support in Wine are :
gl.h:

the denition of all OpenGL core functions, types and enumerants

glx.h:

how OpenGL integrates in the X Window environment

glext.h:

the list of all registered OpenGL extensions The latter le (glext.h) is, as of now, not necessary to build Wine. But as this le can be easily obtained from SGI ( http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ABI/glext.h (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ABI/glext.h)), and that all OpenGL should provide one, I decided to keep it here.

OpenGL library itself

To check for the presence of libGL on the system, the script checks if it denes the glXCreateContext function.

glXGetProcAddressARB function
The core of Wines OpenGL implementation (at least for all extensions) is the glXGetProcAddressARB function. Your OpenGL library needs to have this function dened for Wine to be able to support OpenGL.

How it all works

The core OpenGL function calls are the same between Windows and Linux. So what is the difculty to support it in Wine ? Well, there are two different problems : 1. the interface to the windowing system is different for each OS. Its called GLX for Linux (well, for X Window) and wgl for Windows. Thus, one need rst to emulate one (wgl) with the other (GLX). 2. the calling convention between Windows (the Pascal convention or stdcall) is different from the one used on Linux (the C convention or cdecl). This means that each call to an OpenGL function must be translated and cannot be used directly by the Windows program.

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Add to this some brain-dead programs (using GL calls without setting-up a context or deleting three time the same context) and you have still some work to do :-)

The Windowing system integration

This integration is done at two levels : 1. At GDI level for all pixel format selection routines (ie choosing if one wants a depth / alpha buffer, the size of these buffers, ...) and to do the page ipping in double buffer mode. This is implemented in dlls/x11drv/opengl.c (all these functions are part of Wines graphic driver function pointer table and thus could be reimplemented if ever Wine works on another Windowing system than X). 2. In the OpenGL32.DLL itself for all other functionalities (context creation / deletion, querying of extension functions, ...). This is done in dlls/opengl32/wgl.c.

The thunks
The thunks are the Wine code that does the calling convention translation and they are auto-generated by a Perl script. In Wines Git tree, these thunks are already generated for you. Now, if you want to do it yourself, there is how it all works.... The script is located in dlls/opengl32 and is called make_opengl. It requires Perl5 to work and takes two arguments : 1. The rst is the path to the OpenGL registry. Now, you will all ask but what is the OpenGL registry ? :-) Well, its part of the OpenGL sample implementation source tree from SGI (more information at this URL : http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/). To summarize, these les contain human-readable but easily parsed information on ALL OpenGL core functions and ALL registered extensions (for example the prototype, the OpenGL version, ...).

2. the second is the OpenGL version to simulate. This xes the list of functions that the Windows application can link directly to without having to query them from the OpenGL driver. Windows is based, for now, on OpenGL 1.1, but the thunks that are in the Git tree are generated for OpenGL 1.2. This option can have three values: 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2.

This script generates three les : 1. opengl32.spec gives Wines linker the signature of all function in the OpenGL32.DLL library so that the application can link them. Only core functions are listed here. 2. opengl_norm.c contains all the thunks for the core functions. Your OpenGL library must provide ALL the function used in this le as these are not queried at run time. 3. opengl_ext.c contains all the functions that are not part of the core functions. Contrary to the thunks in opengl_norm.c, these functions do not depend at all on what your libGL provides. In fact, before using one of these thunks, the Windows program rst needs to query the function pointer. At this point, the corresponding thunk is useless. But as we rst query the same function in libGL and store the returned function pointer in the thunk, the latter becomes functional.

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Known problems
When running an OpenGL application, the screen ickers
Due to restrictions (that do not exist in Windows) on OpenGL contexts, if you want to prevent the screen to icker when using OpenGL applications (all games are using double-buffered contexts), you need to set the following option in your ~/.wine/config le in the [x11drv] section:
DesktopDoubleBuffered = Y

and to run Wine in desktop mode.

Unknown extension error message:

Extension defined in the OpenGL library but NOT in opengl_ext.c... Please report ([email protected]) !

This means that the extension requested by the application is found in the libGL used by Linux (ie the call to glXGetProcAddressARB returns a non-NULL pointer) but that this string was NOT found in Wines extension registry. This can come from two causes: 1. The opengl_ext.c le is too old and needs to be generated again. 2. Use of obsolete extensions that are not supported anymore by SGI or of private extensions that are not registered. An example of the former are glMTexCoord2fSGIS and glSelectTextureSGIS as used by Quake 2 (and apparently also by old versions of Half Life). If documentation can be found on these functions, they can be added to Wines extension set.

If you have this, run with WINEDEBUG=+opengl and send me <[email protected]> the TRACE.

libopengl32.so is built but it is still not working

This may be caused by some missing functions required by opengl_norm.c but that your Linux OpenGL library does not provide. To check for this, do the following steps : 1. create a dummy .c le :
int main(void) { return 0; }

2. try to compile it by linking both libwine and libopengl32 (this command line supposes that you installed the Wine libraries in /usr/local/lib, YMMV) :
gcc dummy.c -L/usr/local/lib -lwine -lopengl32

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3. if it works, the problem is somewhere else (and you can send me an email). If not, you could re-generate the thunk les for OpenGL 1.1 for example (and send me your OpenGL version so that this problem can be detected at congure time).

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Chapter 13. Outline of DirectDraw Architecture

This is an outline of the architecture. Many details are skipped, but hopefully this is useful.

DirectDraw inheritance tree

Main | User |-----------\ XVidMode DGA2

Most of the DirectDraw functionality is implemented in a common base class. Derived classes are responsible for providing display mode functions (Enum, Set, Restore), GetCaps, GetDevice identier and internal functions called to create primary and backbuffer surfaces. User provides for DirectDraw capabilities based on drawing to a Wine window. It uses the User DirectDrawSurface implementation for primary and backbuffer surfaces. XVidMode attempt to use the XFree86 VidMode extension to set the display resolution to match the parameters to SetDisplayMode. DGA2 attempt to use the XFree86 DGA 2.x extension to set the display resolution and direct access to the framebuffer, if the full-screen-exclusive cooperative level is used. If not, it just uses the User implementation.

DirectDrawSurface inheritance tree

Main provides a very simple base class that does not implement any of the image-related functions. Therefore it does not place any constraints on how the surface data is stored. DIB stores the surface data in a DIB section. It is used by the Main DirectDraw driver to create off-screen surfaces. User implements primary and backbuffer surfaces for the User DirectDraw driver. If it is a primary surface, it will attempt to keep itself synchronized to the window. DGA2 surfaces claims an appropriate section of framebuffer space and lets DIB build its DIB section on top of it. Fake Z-Buffer surfaces are used by Direct3D to indicate that a primary surface has an associated z-buffer. For a rst implementation, it doesnt need to store any image data since it is just a placeholder. (Actually 3D programs will rarely use Lock or GetDC on primary surfaces, backbuffers or z-buffers so we may want to arrange for lazy allocation of the DIB sections.)

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Interface Thunks
Only the most recent version of an interface needs to be implemented. Other versions are handled by having thunks convert their parameters and call the root version. Not all interface versions have thunks. Some versions could be combined because their parameters were compatible. For example if a structure changes but the structure has a dwSize eld, methods using that structure are compatible, as long as the implementation remembers to take the dwSize into account. Interface thunks for Direct3D are more complicated since the paradigm changed between versions.

Logical Object Layout

The objects are split into the generic part (essentially the elds for Main) and a private part. This is necessary because some objects can be created with CoCreateInstance, then Initialized later. Only at initialization time do we know which class to use. Each class except Main declares a Part structure and adds that to its Impl. For example, the DIBTexture DirectDrawSurface implementation looks like this:
struct DIBTexture_DirectDrawSurfaceImpl_Part { union DIBTexture_data data; /*declared in the real header*/ }; typedef struct { struct DIB_DirectDrawSurfaceImpl_Part dib; struct DIBTexture_DirectDrawSurfaceImpl_Part dibtexture; } DIBTexture_DirectDrawSurfaceImpl;

So the DIBTexture surface class is derived from the DIB surface class and it adds one piece of data, a union. Main does not have a Part structure. Its elds are stored in IDirectDrawImpl/IDirectDrawSurfaceImpl. To access private data, one says
DIBTexture_DirectDrawSurfaceImpl* priv = This->private; do_something_with(priv->dibtexture.data);

Creating Objects
Classes have two functions relevant to object creation, Create and Construct. To create a new object, the class Create function is called. It allocates enough memory for IDirectDrawImpl or IDirectDrawSurfaceImpl as well as the private data for derived classes and then calls Construct. Each classs Construct function calls the base classs Construct, then does the necessary initialization. For example, creating a primary surface with the user ddraw driver calls User_DirectDrawSurface_Create which allocates memory for the object and calls User_DirectDrawSurface_Construct to initialize it. This calls DIB_DirectDrawSurface_Construct which calls Main_DirectDrawSurface_Construct.

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Chapter 14. Wine and Multimedia

This le contains information about the implementation of the multimedia layer of Wine. The implementation can be found in the dlls/winmm/ directory (and in many of its subdirectories), but also in dlls/msacm/ (for the audio compression/decompression manager) and dlls/msvideo/ (for the video compression/decompression manager).

Overview
The multimedia stuff is split into 3 layers. The low level (device drivers), mid level (MCI commands) and high level abstraction layers. The low level layer has also some helper DLLs (like the MSACM/MSACM32 and MSVIDEO/MSVFW32 pairs). All of those components are dened as DLLs (one by one). The low level layer may depend on current hardware and OS services (like OSS on Unix). It provides the core of playback/record using ne grain objects (audio/midi streams...). Mid level (MCI) and high level layers must be written independently from the hardware and OS services. MCI level provides some coarser grain operations (like playing a Midi le, or playing a video stream).

Multimedia architecture
Windows 95 multimedia architecture
| Kernel space | Client applications | | | | ^ ^ | | | | | 16>| |<32 16>| |<32 16>| |<32 16>| |<32 | | v | | | v | v | +----|-----------|---------|------------|-------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +----|-----------|---------|------------|-------+ | | | | ^ | | | | +------+ | |<16 | | | |<16 | | | 16>| | | | | | | | | | v v v | | v v v | | +---------------+---+-------------+-------------+ | | | waveInXXX | | mciXXX | *playSound* | | | | waveOutXXX | | | mmioXXX | | | | midiInXXX | | | timeXXX | | | | midiOutXXX | | | driverXXX | | | | midiStreamXXX | | | | | | | mixerXXX | | | | +--------+ | | | auxXXX +---+ +---+ mmThread| | |MMDEVLDR|<------->| joyXXX | Call back | mmTask | | +--------+ | | +-----------+-----------+---------+-------------+ ^ | | | ^ ^ | ^ | | | 16>| |<16>| 16>| |<16 v | | v | | v | +--------+ | | +-------------+ +----------+

WinMM.dll 32 bit

MMSystem.dll 16 bit

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| VxD |<------->| | | mci*.drv | *.drv +--------+ | | +--------------+ +-----------+ | | | msacm.drv | | mciwave | | | +--------------+ +-----------+ | | | midimap.drv | | mcimidi | | | +-------------+ +-----------+ | | Low-level drivers | ... | MCI drivers | | +----------+ | | | | | |<16 | +-------------------------------+ |

The important points to notice are:

all drivers (and most of the core code) is 16 bit all hardware (or most of it) dependent code reside in the kernel space (which is not surprising)

Windows NT multimedia architecture

Note that Win 98 has mixed 95/NT architecture, so when speaking about Windows 95 (resp. NT) architecture, it refers to the type of architecture, not whats actually implemented. For example, Windows 98 implements both types of architectures. The important points to notice (compared to the Windows 95 architecture) are:

drivers (low level, MCIs...) are 32 bit and Unicode the interfaces between kernel and user drivers has changed, but it doesnt impact much Wine. Those changes allow some good things (like kernel mixing, where different apps share the audio hardware) and of course bad things (like kernel mixing, which adds latency).

Wine multimedia architecture

| Kernel space | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Client applications | | ^ ^ | | | | 16>| |<32 16>| |<32 16>| |<32 16>| |<32 | | | | | | | | +------+ | | | | | | | | |32/16>| | | | | | | | | | v v v | | v v v v | +---------------+---+-------------+-------------+ | | waveInXXX | | mciXXX | *playSound* | | | waveOutXXX | | | mmioXXX | WinMM.dll | | midiInXXX | | | timeXXX | 32 bit | | midiOutXXX | | | driverXXX | | | midiStreamXXX | | | | MMSystem.dll | | mixerXXX | | | | 16 bit | | auxXXX +---+ +---+ mmThread| |

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| | | joyXXX | Call back | mmTask | | | | +-----------+-----------+---------+-------------+ | | || ^ ^ | ^ | | 16>||<32 |<16>| 16>| |<16 | | vv |<32>| 32>v |<32 +---------+ | | +-------------+ +----------+ |HW driver|<------->| | | mci*.drv | *.drv +---------+ | | +--------------+ +-----------+ | | | msacm.drv | | mciwave | | | +--------------+ +-----------+ | | | midimap.drv | | mcimidi | | | +-------------+ +-----------+ | | Low-level drivers | ... | MCI drivers | | +----------+ | | | | | |<32/16 | +-------------------------------+ |

From the previous drawings, the most noticeable differences are:

low-level drivers can either be 16 or 32 bit (in fact, Wine supports only native wave and audio mappers). MCI drivers can either be 16 or 32 bit all built-in drivers (low-level and MCI) will be written as 32 bit drivers

Wines WinMM automatically adapts the messages to be sent to a driver so that it can convert it to 16 or 32 bit interfaces.

Low level layers

The low level drivers abstract the hardware specic features from the rest of the multimedia code. Those are implemented with a well dened set of APIs, as windows do. Please note that native low level drivers are not currently supported in Wine, because they either access hardware components or require VxDs to be loaded; Wine does not correctly supports those two so far. There are two specic low level drivers (msacm.drv for wave input/output, midimap.drv for MIDI output only). These drivers (also present in Windows) allow:

choosing one low level driver between many (well discuss how the choice is made later on) add the possibility to convert streams format (ie ADPCM => PCM) (this is useful if the format required by the application for playback isnt supported by the soundcard). add the possibility to lter a stream (adding echo, equalizer... to a wave stream, or modify the instruments that have to be played for a MIDI stream).

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Hardware-bound low level drivers

Each low lever driver has to implement at least one of the following functionality, through the named function:

Waveform audio: out for playback, and in for recording. MMSYSTEM and WINMM call the real low level audio driver using the drivers wodMessage and widMessage functions which handle the different requests. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface): out for playback, and in for recording. MMSYSTEM and WINMM call the low level driver functions using the drivers midMessage and the modMessage functions. Mixer: this allows setting the volume for each one of the other functionnality (and also some specic attributes, like left/right balance for stereo streams...). MMSYSTEM and WINMM call the low level driver functions using the mxdMessage function. Aux: this is the predecessor of the mixer functionnality (introduced in Win 95). Its usage has been deprecated in favor of mixer interfaces.

Wine currently supports the following (kernel) multimedia interfaces.

Open Sound System (OSS) as supplied in the Linux and FreeBSD kernels by 4Front Technologies (http://www.4front-tech.com/). The presence of this driver is checked by congure (depends on the <sys/soundcard.h> le). Source code resides in dlls/winmm/wineoss. Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA (http://www.alsa-project.org/)) as supplied in the Linux kernel. Source code resides in dlls/winmm/winealsa. Analog RealTime Synthetizer (aRts (http://www.arts-project.org/)): a network server (and virtual mixer) used in the KDE project. Enlightenment Sound Daemon (EsounD (http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/EsounD.html)): a network server used in the GNOME project. Network Audio Server (NAS (http://radscan.com/nas.html)): an audio server. Jack (http://jackit.sourceforge.net/): a low latency audio server. AudioIO: the native Solaris audio interface.

The supported functionnalities per driver is as follows (this table lists the available features of the products, not exactly whats actually implemented on Wine): Table 14-1. Wine multimedia drivers functionalities Driver OSS ALSA aRts ESD NAS AudioIO Jack Wave Out Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Wave In Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Midi Out Yes Yes No No No No No Midi In Yes Yes No No No No No Mixer (and Aux) Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Lots of listed drivers wont support Midi (in a short time) because the exposed "Un*x" native interfaces dont. This

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would require using some kind as software synthesis (as Timidity), but we cannot incorporate as its GPLed.

Wave mapper (msacm.drv)

The Wave mapper device allows to load on-demand audio codecs in order to perform software conversion for the types the actual low level driver (hardware). Those codecs are provided through the standard ACM drivers in MSACM32.DLL. Wave mapper driver implementation can be found in dlls/winmm/wavemap/ directory. This driver heavily relies on MSACM and MSACM32 DLLs which can be found in dlls/msacm and dlls/msacm32. Those DLLs load ACM drivers which provide the conversion to PCM format (which is normally supported by low level drivers). A Law, uLaw, ADPCM, MP3... t into the category of non PCM formats.

MIDI mapper (midimap.drv)

Midi mapper allows to map each one of 16 MIDI channels to a specic instrument on an installed sound card. This allows for example to support different MIDI instrument denitions (XM, GM...). It also permits to output on a per channel basis to different MIDI renderers. A built-in MIDI mapper can be found in dlls/winmm/midimap/. It partly provides the same functionality as the Windows one. It allows to pick up destination channels: you can map a given channel to a specic playback device channel (see the conguration bits for more details).

Mid level drivers (MCI)

The mid level drivers are represented by some common API functions, mostly mciSendCommand and mciSendString. Wine implements several MCI mid level drivers. Table 14-2. Wine MCI drivers MCI Name CdAudio DLL Name MciCDA.drv Role MCI interface to a CD audio player Location
dlls/winmm/mcicda/

Comments

Relies on NT CdRom raw in (through

DeviceIoCon

WaveAudio

MciWave.drv

MCI interface for wave playback and record Midi Sequencer (playback) AVI playback and record

dlls/winmm/mciwave/

It uses the low audio API.

Sequencer AviVideo

MciSeq.drv MciAvi.drv

dlls/winmm/mciseq/ dlls/winmm/mciavi/

It uses the low midi APIs

It rather heav relies on MSVIDEO/M DLLs pair to w

The MCI Name column is the name of the MCI driver, as it is searched in conguration. The DLL Name column is the name of the DLL the conguration provides as a value. The name listed here is the default one (see the conguration section for the details). Adding a new MCI driver is just a matter of writing the corresponding DLL with the correct interface (see existing

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MCI drivers for the details), and to provide the relevant setup information for wine.inf

High level layers

WINMM (and MMSYSTEM)
The high level layers encompass basically the MMSYSTEM and WINMM DLLs exported APIs. It also provides the skeleton for the core functionality for multimedia playback and recording. Note that native MMSYSTEM and WINMM do not currently work under Wine and there is no plan to support them (it would require to also fully support VxD, which is not done yet). WINMM and MMSYSTEM in Wine can handle both 16 bit and 32 bit drivers (for low level and MCI drivers). It will handle all the conversions transparently for the all the calls to WINMM and MMSYSTEM, as it knows what the driver interface is (16 bit or 32 bit) and it manages the information sent accordingly. MCI drivers are seen as regular Wine modules, and can be loaded (with a correct load order between builtin, native), as any other DLL. Please note, that MCI drivers module names must bear the .drv extension to be correctly understood. Multimedia timers are implemented with a dedicated thread, run in the context of the calling process, which should correctly mimic Windows behavior. The only drawback is that the thread will appear the calling process if it enumerates the running processes.

DSOUND
Wine also provide a DSound (DirectX) DLL with the proper COM implementation. Note that a Wine specic ag has been added to the wodOpen function, so that the DSound DLL can get a reference to a COM sound object from a given WINMM wave output device. This should be changed in the future.

MS ACM Dlls
Contents
The MSACM32 (and its 16 bit sibbling MSACM) provide a way to map a given wave format to another format. It also provides ltering capabilities. Those DLLs only implement the proper switch between a caller and a driver providing the implementation of the requested format change or lter operation. Theres nothing specic in Wines implementation compared to Windows one. Heres however a list of the builtin format change drivers (theres no lter driver yet): Table 14-3. Wine ACM drivers Name imaadp32 msadp32 msg711 winemp3 Provides IMA ADPCM (adaptative PCM) Microsofts ADPCM (adaptative PCM) Microsofts G.711 (A-Law and textmu-Law) Wines MP3 (MPEG Layer 3), based on mpglib library

Note that Wine also supports native audio codecs as well.

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All builtin ACM drivers are 32 bit Unicode DLLs

Caching
The MSACM/MSACM32 keeps some data cached for all known ACM drivers. Under the key
Software\Microsoft\AudioCompressionManager\DriverCache\<driver name>

, are kept for values:

aFormatTagCache

which contains an array of DWORD. There are two DWORDs per cFormatTags entry. The rst DWORD contains a format tag value, and the second the associated maximum size for a WAVEFORMATEX structure. (Fields dwFormatTag and cbFormatSize from ACMFORMATDETAILS) contains the number of tags supported by the driver for ltering. contains the number of tags support by the driver for conversions.

cFilterTags cFormatTags fdwSupport

(the same as the one returned from acmDriverDetails).

The cFilterTags, cFormatTags, fdwSupport are the same values as the ones returned from acmDriverDetails function.

MS Video Dlls
Contents
The MSVFW32 (and its 16 bit sibbling MSVIDEO) provide encode/decode video streams. Those DLLs only implement the proper switch between a caller and a driver providing the implementation of the requested format coding/decoding operation. Theres nothing specic in Wines implementation compared to Windows one. Heres however a list of the builtin decoding drivers: Table 14-4. Wine VIDC drivers Name msrle32 msvidc32 iccvid Provides Microsofts RLE (Run-Length encoded) Microsofts Video-1 Radius Cinepak Video Decoder

Note that Wine also supports native video codecs as well. All builtin VIDC drivers are 32 bit Unicode DLLs

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Multimedia conguration
Unfortunately, multimedia conguration evolved over time:

In the early days on Windows 3.x, conguration was stored in system.in le, under various sections ([drivers] for low level drivers, [mci] (resp. [mci32]) for 16 bit (resp. 32 bit) MCI drivers...). With the apparition of the registry, in Windows 95, conguration as been duplicated there, under the key
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\MediaResources

Windows NT also adopted the registry, but decided to store the conguration information under another key than Windows 9x did.
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

And with a different layout of keys and values beneath this key.

Currently, Wine tries to load rst a driver (low-level or MCI) from the NT registry settings. If it fails, it will try the system.ini conguration. An out-of-the-box conguration is provided in wine.inf, and shall be stored in registry and system.ini at Wine installation time. It will setup correctly the MCI drivers conguration (as well as the wave and MIDI mappers). As the low-level drivers depend on hardware, their setup will be handled by winecfg. Table 14-5. Wine multimedia conguration scheme Driver MCI drivers Wave and MIDI mappers Read from NT registry Yes (1) Yes Read from
system.ini

Setup by
wine.inf

Setup by winecfg No No Yes No

Yes (2) No No Yes

Yes Yes No Yes

Hardware-bound low Yes level drivers ACM and VIDC drivers (audio & video codecs) No

This will allow most settings to be correctly loaded and handled. However, it wont if an app tries to search directly the registry for the actual conguration, as the three potential conguration places may not be in sync. It still lacks a correct installation scheme (as any multimedia device under Windows), so that all the correct keys are created in the registry. This requires an advanced model since, for example, the number of wave out devices can only be known on the destination system (depends on the sound card driven by the OSS interface). The following sections describe which type of information (depending on the location) Wines multimedia DLLs understand.

NT conguration
Under the
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

key, are stored the names of the DLLs to be loaded for each MCI driver name:

127

Chapter 14. Wine and Multimedia

"cdaudio"="mcicda.drv" "sequencer"="mciseq.drv" "waveaudio"="mciwave.drv" "avivideo"="mciavi.drv" "videodisc"="mcipionr.drv" "vcr"="mcivisca.drv" "MPEGVideo"="mciqtz.drv"

system.ini
Wine will read the MCI drivers from the [mci] or [mci32] section. Wine wont make any difference between the two. Heres a sample conguration:
[mci] cdaudio=mcicda.drv sequencer=mciseq.drv waveaudio=mciwave.drv avivideo=mciavi.drv videodisc=mcipionr.drv vcr=mcivisca.drv MPEGVideo=mciqtz.drv

ACM drivers conguration is read (only so far) from the system.ini (and setup at Wine installation from the wine.inf le).
[drivers32] MSACM.imaadpcm=imaadp32.acm MSACM.msadpcm=msadp32.acm MSACM.msg711=msg711.acm MSACM.winemp3=winemp3.acm

Video (aka vidc) drivers conguration is read (only so far) from the system.ini (and setup at Wine installation from the wine.inf le).
[drivers32] VIDC.MRLE=msrle32.dll VIDC.MSVC=msvidc32.dll VIDC.CVID=iccvid.dll

See also the conguration part of the Users Guide for other information on low level drivers.

128

Chapter 14. Wine and Multimedia

Per driver/DLL conguration

Midi mapper
The Midi mapper conguration is the same as on Windows 9x. Under the key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\MIDIMap

if the UseScheme value is not set, or is set to a null value, the MIDI mapper will always use the driver identied by the CurrentInstrument value. Note: Wine (for simplicity while installing) allows to dene CurrentInstrument as #n (where n is a number), whereas Windows only allows the real device name here. If UseScheme is set to a non null value, CurrentScheme denes the name of the scheme to map the different channels. All the schemes are available with keys like

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\MediaProperties\PrivateProperties\Midi\Schemes

For every scheme, under this key, will be a sub-key (which name is usually a two digit index, starting at 00). Its default value is the name of the output driver, and the value Channels lists all channels (of the 16 standard MIDI ones) which have to be copied to this driver. To provide enhanced conguration and mapping capabilities, each driver can dene under the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\MediaProperties\PrivateProperties\Midi\Ports\%

a link to and .IDF le which allows to remap channels internally (for example 9 -> 16), to change instruments identication, event controllers values. See the source le dlls/winmm/midimap/midimap.c for the details (this isnt implemented yet).

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