Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 29th Nov 2007 21:22 UTC, submitted by Steven Edwards
On the Wine mailing list, there is some interesting information on Leopard's apparent ability to load basic Windows binaries. "When tracking down a crash in the kernel32 loader test, Dmitry found a bug in the Mac OS loader when Wine tried to load his dummy PE file. Upon further research I found that the Mac loader seems to have its own undocumented PE loader built in. I did some further testing with a Windows binary and got some really interesting results." The first thought was that this was a remnant from Mac OS X' EFI support, but upon further investigation, this really seems like new, Leopard-specific behaviour: "This is new to Leopard. On Tiger, dlopen rejects PE files as expected. The Wine testing that Steven was originally trying to do would probably not crash on Tiger." Apparently, Apple is trying its best to hide this behaviour.
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Member since:2006-06-12
Member since:2007-11-25
I find it hard to believe mac could do it on their own. look how long its taken wine to get to the point it's at now. Then you have to ask yourself, if Apple didn't get the documention from microsoft, why would they go to all the trouble to reverse engineer the windows api like that? Instead of promoting/trying to get people to port stuff to their own system.
Member since:2005-12-15
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-06-21
I find it hard to believe mac could do it on their own.
What Apple has and the Wine team doesn't is complete access to the Windows XP API. The 1997 agreement between Apple and Microsoft (which ran until 2002) covered cross-licensing technology between the two companies. Windows XP shipped in 2001.
I'll let Robert Cringely explain the rest:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060420_000893.html
I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.
So it's not a question of whether Apple can do this, it's whether they'd have enough reasons to do it.
Member since:2007-02-22
If they did/do build the ability for osx to run native windows applications, would there be any legal consequences if they didn't ask MS before hand?
PE is a file format, albiet one with somewhat hard-to-come-by documentation; the fact that it's associated with Microsoft means nothing in particular.
Microsoft'd probably be thrilled to discover Apple just gave them about 3-5 million new possible customers of Microsoft office suites and games. For that matter, they might even helping Apple; despite all the juvenile ads, Microsoft remains one of Apple's biggest vendors.
But I suspect it's more related to Bootcamp (Apple's Windows+OSX bootloader) than anything else.
Member since:2005-08-26
Hard-to-come-by?
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/PECOFF.mspx
Is there anything missing in that that means it's hard-to-come-by?
Member since:
2006-02-22
If they did/do build the ability for osx to run native windows applications, would there be any legal consequences if they didn't ask MS before hand?