Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5MjA

by microwise • 13 years ago

93 41 13 years ago

phoronix.com

ars• 13 years ago

Do you need ARM applications, or does it emulate X86 too?

gahahaha• 13 years ago

I don't know, but from the Wine ARM wiki:

"""Possible goals: run the assembler parts of x86 in qemu and call function in Wine compiled for ARM"""

digisign2• 13 years ago

Wine is not an emulator. ;)

shmerl• 13 years ago

This is misleading, since it means it's not a CPU emulator, however it's an emulator of Windows in a sense that it mimics the Windows environment and system libraries.

loeg4• 13 years ago

The reason WINE works is that it essentially runs x86 programs as-is and provides the needed linkage (shared libraries) used by the Windows programs. (Windows syscalls are usually issued through an intermediary shared library, so WINE can trap them there.) Much of this work is re-implementing the various libraries; bugs in WINE can usually be attributed to missing functionality (incomplete or stubbed functions) or bugs in the WINE implementation.

Running an x86 program directly on ARM is … impossible. So maybe WINE on ARM can serve to run WinRT applications… but none of the existing x86 Windows applications can run without x86 emulation, which would be absurdly slow on Android devices.

Edit: Another commenter says that the project wiki suggests using qemu to run the x86 code on ARM, and then trap calls into native (ARM) WINE libraries. This approach seems unlikely to yield good performance. I am concerned that different C and C++ calling conventions means some additional work will have to be done to cleanup function arguments at every call, which is just more overhead on top of x86 emulation…

mikecane2• 13 years ago

>>>So maybe WINE on ARM can serve to run WinRT applications

That would be a trick: How do you buy RT apps when not on a Microsoft-approved device?

loeg4• 13 years ago

Good question. I am not actually familiar with the specifics of WinRT; I haven't touched Windows regularly since the early 2000s.

jevinskie2• 13 years ago

Maybe you first buy them on a MS-approved device and either copy the app from that device or are able to get a DL link that works on the other device.

lucian1900• 13 years ago

But Wine on x86 Android would be useful.

loeg4• 13 years ago

Sure, but then it's just normal WINE. Not WINE on ARM, which is suggested by the article =).

demallien• 13 years ago

Actually, the performance might not be as bad as you would at first think. A good chunk of the work done by a graphical application is actually done by the graphics system supplied by the "OS", and in this case, that code would be natively compiled.

It's analogous (performance-wise) to writing gui apps in python - provided you're not trying to do any heavy lifting in the actual application code, it could work quite well.

Apple's Rosetta technology for running PowerPC code on Intel Macs actually worked this way, and the performance for most apps was really quite acceptable. That said, Rosetta had the advantage of moving from relatively slow CPUs to the fastest in the world. In the case of ARM / Android, you would be trying to run Windows apps on a slower CPU, so the results wouldn't be as good as Rosetta...

loeg4• 13 years ago

I agree with everything you have said. I would just add that I think many of the most useful (and widely used) Windows applications do do heavy lifting in native code — Word, Excel, and Photoshop are all good examples here. They aren't explicitly number-crunching like BTC mining or SETI@Home, but there is a lot of x86 code running under the hood.

dkersten• 13 years ago

What we need is an x86 emulator that JIT compiles the x86 code to ARM.

dfox2• 13 years ago

Which is exactly what qemu does. Although there is significant space for optimizing the host code produced by qemu.

anonymfus• 13 years ago

>Another commenter says that the project wiki suggests using qemu to run the x86 code on ARM, and then trap calls into native (ARM) WINE libraries. This approach seems unlikely to yield good performance. I am concerned that different C and C++ calling conventions means some additional work will have to be done to cleanup function arguments at every call, which is just more overhead on top of x86 emulation…

There is already similar project about running x86 windows application on top of Windows RT:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2095934

It will be interesting to compare.

btown• 13 years ago

How difficult would it be to get Wine running on a jailbroken iOS device?

digisign2• 13 years ago

It would be a waste of time; the devices are arm and not x86.

duaneb3• 13 years ago

Windows runs on ARM too. Not sure any of the apps are worth emulating though.

NathanKP• 13 years ago

If Android gains traction on x86-based tablets and other mobile devices, CodeWeavers has a lot of commercial opportunities for pushing the running of Windows software on Android.

I honestly don't see how there would be that much of a market. Any native Android implementation of a particular program will be much nicer to use than a Wine emulated program. Really the only use I have ever found for Wine and other emulation programs is for running Windows games on other platforms and usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games.

GigabyteCoin• 13 years ago

SkiFree would actually be pretty fun on an Android.

brokenparser• 13 years ago

Here you go: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kudzu.plan...

yareally2• 13 years ago

DOSbox has been out for Android for quite some time. Takes a little configuring, but it works. I've seen people running windows 3.1 and win 95 on Android as well.

http://androiddosbox.appspot.com/

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1325643

polshaw• 13 years ago

>running Windows games on other platforms and usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games

IME this is out-of-date.. I run PES 2013 with wine. (I haven't tried many other games, but quite a few are compatible). I have to run it on one setting lower, other than that its almost identical to running it on windows, wine is impressive these days. I agree it would be quite limited with ARM, although there are x86 phones.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

This is very much a YMMV thing. Some things work an order of magnitude better than others under wine.

I've also had things which have worked fine under wine get an update, or I've updated something else on my system and then all of a sudden it completely breaks.

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

>Wine and other emulation programs

Wine isn't an emulator (it's in the name!), it's a compatibility layer.

>usually the performance is too poor or unreliable

Nonsense. Wine being a compatibility layer means that, while some apps are quite a bit slower, performance is generally good.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

In prinicple, anything worth having is worth having in a Android-native touch-optimized implementation. But...

There is a lot of software, especially on a formerly hegemonic platform like Windows with a decades-long history, that will never get ported or functionally recreated.

Most of it deservedly so, but some some of it is going to be valuable enough to enough people that a compatibility system will be just the right thing because a reimplementation would take too long and/or cost too much.

mkl• 13 years ago

usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games.

This is far from universally true - in my experience it is actually slightly backwards. A few years ago I had to benchmark a Windows program against a Linux one I had written, and the Windows program ran slightly faster under WINE than under Windows. (This was mostly computational, without much use of Windows APIs, and no graphics in the timed sections.)

pippy• 13 years ago

So we have windows apps on android, and android apps running on windows 8?

habosa• 13 years ago

I love ambitious projects like this, but I can't help but think this is a waste of some formidable developer talent. First, running Windows apps on Android will give Android even more of a battery life problem than it already has. Second, this will possibly increase the chance that some software shops will be even lazier in making native ports of popular applications and just tell people to use WINE. Third, if people want this kind of experience they should just buy a Surface Pro or some kind of Ubuntu touch device that can already run WINE. Again, I applaud anyone who will undertake a project of this difficulty but I just don't see the point.

Raphael• 13 years ago

You don't have to run Android on battery.

yareally2• 13 years ago

I don't see the issue. It's not like people are going to be tossing up Wine apps in the market en massé.

joelbm24• 13 years ago

all this just to run internet explorer on a macbook

UntitledNo4• 13 years ago

http://www.modern.ie/virtualization-tools

ikonst• 13 years ago

http://www.winulator.com/

P.S. knowing this dude's previous work (coLinux), he's pretty good :)

damian2000• 13 years ago

Anyone know what the benefits/drawbacks are of running WINE on a MacBook/Linix versus running Windows in a VM such as VirtualBox?

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

With a VM you will be able to run more software more reliably but suffer a significant performance hit and require a Windows license for the VM and it will take a chunk of your RAM.

WINE is more likely to be glitchy & unreliable with many programs, will require special configuration in some cases and may not work at al in others. However since it doesn't have to emulate a computer (it basically re-implements parts of the Windows API) the performance is usually on a par or only slightly worse than native windows. You don't need a Windows license to run WINE however.

Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps

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