Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD, first evaluation report

This report was written by Naveen Narayanan as part of Google Summer of Code 2019.

I have been working on porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD as a GSoC 2019 project. Wine is a compatibility layer which allows running Microsoft Windows applications on POSIX-complaint operating systems. This report provides an overview of the progress of the project during the first coding period.

WINE on i386

Initially, when I started working on getting Wine-4.4 to build and run on NetBSD i386 the primary issue that I faced was Wine displaying black windows instead of UI, and this applied to any graphical program I tried running with Wine.

I suspected it , as it is related to graphics, to be an issue with the graphics driver or Xorg. Subsequently, I tried building modular Xorg, and I tried running Wine on it only to realize that Xorg being modular didn't affect it in the least. After having tried a couple of configurations, I realized that trying to hazard out every other probability is going to take an awful lot of time that I didn't have. This motivated me to bisect the repo using git, and find the first version of Wine which failed on NetBSD.

I started with the last version of Wine that worked on NetBSD which is 1.9.18. After two days of git bisect, I had the culprit. It was a commit that introduced a single clipboard manager thread per window station in Wine. Later, I found that pthread_create(3) calls were borked and didn't return anything. I tried to walk through the code to know where in pthreads lib was the program getting stuck at. Finally, I got a segfault.

I realized the address at which it segfaulted was identical to the address at which Wine has been throwing an unhandled page fault. I had a hunch that these two issues were some how correlated. After learning more about memory mapping and /proc, I was sure black windows was an effect of this unhandled page fault.

Eventually, I found that pthread_attr_setstack(3) was setting the guard size to 65536 bytes even though the man page said otherwise. And Wine relied on it not being set. This resulted in out-of-bound access which caused the unhandled page fault. After setting the guard size to 0 using pthread_attr_setguardsize(3), Wine started behaving fine.

I discussed about the patch with Wine devs, and they were happy to upstream it as long as it didn't cause any inadvertent issues on other platforms. Of course, who wouldn't want to play mario now?

WINE on amd64

Compiling Wine with 32 bit support is a bit tricky on amd64. I proceeded with the chroot approach as I wanted to know if Wine worked as promised on NetBSD, and if it didn't, to what degree, it required patching. So, as the first step, I compiled Wine on amd64 and it ran fine. The subsequent step was to build a chroot environment for i386. I corresponded with my mentors to learn more about compat32_netbsd and successfully built an i386 chroot. I had to compile Wine twice under i386 to have it inject the 32 bit components to 64 bit Wine for WoW64 support. And to my amazement, it worked!

Summary

I think Wine-4.4 is in pretty good shape as of right now, but packaging it is tricky especially since chroot isn't an option, as it is privileged. I have been writing compat32 packages for dependencies of Wine to have them crosscompiled on amd64. I shall be working on getting Wine crosscompiled for 32 bit support on amd64 during the next coding period. On a different note and a very important one, I would like to thank my mentors @christos, @leot, @maya, and @maxv for their valuable suggestions. From where I see it, I wouldn't have reached this phase if it weren't for them. I would also like to thank @kamil for his feedback and input.