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: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:2006-06-02
Apple couldn't use the information using the license in that page. The license is granted only
"for the limited purpose of implementing and complying with the required portions of this specification only in the software development tools known as compilers, linkers, and assemblers targeting Microsoft Windows."
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Member since:
2007-02-22
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.