Wine vs Windows Benchmarks 286
PeterBrett writes "Tom Wickline recently posted to the Wine development list announcing that he'd done some benchmarks comparing Windows XP to Wine. They should be taken with the requisite dose of salt, but Wine has certainly come a long way."
Very Impressive! (Score:5, Informative)
I've quite impressed with the performance of WINE, however these stats can be a little deceiving. These stats are based on a game that works. Getting the game to work in the first place can be quite a challenge. But for the part-time gamer that doesn't wanna be chained to Windows, this is a great alternative indeed!
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:3, Informative)
There are precompiled packages avalible to speed things up, but where's the fun in that.
Yeah, Debian to Gentoo is quite easy. Just use "emerge" vice "apt-get".
Look it up in the Application DB (was Re:cool!) (Score:5, Informative)
I know this is repeat info for most people, but for the newbies...
There's actually an online application database where people have submitted their experiences/successes in getting Windows apps to run under Wine. If you want to see how well Office 2k3 works under Wine, this'd be the first place to look. Conversely, if you have success running a given Windows app, be sure to submit your experiences. Feedback to the App DB not only helps other Wine users, but is helpful feedback for Wine developers on outstanding compatibility issues.
The URL is: http://appdb.winehq.org/ [winehq.org]
Re:Strange choice of benchmarks... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:These tests don't really put Wine in a good lig (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic (Score:5, Informative)
*shrug* same site it was two years ago. Yes, Gentoo is swarming with clueless n00bies; I was a clueless n00bie once and so was everybody else. If it gives them something to play with, keeps their interests, and gets them learning about Linux, it's worth having to deal with "why doesn't -Os -f-unroll-loops work?" when I talk to one (and I try to help them, because plenty of people helped me back in the day -- that's the whole spirit of GNU, right?).
Seriously, what should n00bies do, then? Gentoo is a largely user-configured operating system with unbelievably simple and hand-holding documentations. Yes, #gentoo is always full of n00bs asking why they can't boot now that they disabled all block devices in their kernel. But then again, that means it's full of n00bs who have configured and compiled a kernel; other distros I've seen say "WARNING WARNING ELITE USERS ONLY" about that. Why? People point out (rightly) that you can install Gentoo and still be an ignoramus. However, if you're actually interested in learning, you can also learn from the installation procedure the commands for fdisk, the options to hdparm, how chroot works, what /etc/resolv.conf is, blah, blah, blah.
funroll-loops is half-right. Gentoo is not simply a ricer distribution; it's a hobbyist distribution. It's the kit-car of distros. There are plenty of people who are doing the software equivalent of bolting a huge spoiler on their Civic. But there are plenty of us who are just having fun. And, anyways, the point of free software is that we're free to do what we want with it, even if that means being a moronic jackass.
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:no salt, but lies and damned stats (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Compatibility more important than speed! (Score:3, Informative)
As a last ditch effort we tried running it under wine. No problems. It just worked. Wine was able to run an windows application that windows couldnt.
On related news... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Very Impressive! (Score:3, Informative)
Let me doubt that - there's many "hidden functionality" in windows (ie: bugs created in windows 95 and that apps started to use and need it to work reliably and that they were kept because of compatibility reasons. Remember all those 0x0000blah numbers in Windows\system.ini? Each 0x0000blah number activates a special hack neccesary to keep the apps named before the number working. I doubt they documented that part )
Re:Very Impressive! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:DirectX: vendor-lock-in and avoid paying to SGI (Score:4, Informative)
Love the 'personal' theories...
Microsoft did not even have an alternative to OpenGL in development when Microsoft pulled out of OpenGL. Microsoft pressed for OpenGL to enhance low level hardware support with intention of doing more than cad/engineering and supporting 3D rendering environment conducive to gaming and directly access video card hardware for gaming.
OpenGL told Microsoft to go pound sand, and that OpenGL was not for games or going to support direct hardware features for gaming.
Microsoft started stringing together a set of technologies that were called WinG, mainly a 2D form of rendering with plans for a new model that was a 3D rendering solution with direct video access on par of what the current DOS based games were used to, but in the Windows environment.
If OpenGL would have not 'played catch-up' to DirectX, and instead took Microsoft's recommendations at the time Microsoft was a big OpenGL proponent, there would never have been a DirectX, as OpenGL would be what Microsoft would be using, and contributing to instead.
The vendor lock in, was just a bonus in the long run, it was others involved in OpenGL that made the choice to not go for gaming.
But you can say it was about paying to SGI or a diabolical plan to take control of the gaming industry, but the facts don't support it.
The second part of this topic is that DirectX evolved to be more than an alternative to OpenGL, as it encapsulates everything from input devices, networking, to sound and voice.
When DirectX first existed it was the only game in town for any standardized interface to video for accelerated graphics in gaming. Now it is more than just Video...
Big prblemo (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What do you think reverse engineering is ? (Score:5, Informative)
Wine is most certainly a reverse engineering effort. The problem is that you don't fully understand what reverse engineering includes.
Reverse engineering also includes the following process:
This is black box reverse engineering. You treat some piece of software as a block box, write tests for it, figure out what the "box" is doing, and recreate that behavior. No decompilation required, no source code required, just lots of tests and ingenuity. This has the benefit that no copyright violations are required (since you never decompile the original program). This process is also used in clean room design [wikipedia.org], except step 3 is replaced with a documentation step -- instead of code being the result of the process a specification is the result. Compaq did this to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS.
Wine is most certainly doing this, as it's the only way to determine undocumented connections between various APIs. Mono certainly does this ("what's this member supposed to do, and is Mono's version following that behavior properly?"). Another way to think of this is for bugs -- does this Mono code do what the .NET equivalent code does? If not, we'll get a bugzilla [ximian.com] entry for it, and (eventually) fix it. This bug-report/fix cycle can also be considered as black box reverse engineering, since the bug-report is itself a test, through which we can determine what the actual functionality should be.
Decompilation is generally not legal, since it can lead to copyright violations. Black box reverse engineering is legal, and any attempt to limit black box reverse engineering would kill the interoperability market, since no compatible hardware/software could ever be created unless the original manufacturer permitted it.
Re:Reverse engineering is... (Score:3, Informative)
That's why Intel has tried to sue the pants off AMD and has failed. Clean room reverse engineering is a technique that DOES permit invasive inspection of decompiled binaries and has been upheld as legal and legitimate, in possibly the most famous example of reverse engineering in moderm computing: the IBM/Compaq BIOS case. [jmusheneaux.com]
Re:Flight Simulator (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Example of distorted statistics (Score:4, Informative)
This test was never intended to show up on sites like Slashdot. The page was made with Wine's developers in mind to have a place to watch performance differences between wine versions. Nobody is trying to say Wine is better than Windows. It's not supposed to be a 'credible benchmark' for the purposes some of you are using it. The main idea behind it is so that in future versions of wine we can run these tests again and see how the results changed. How we represent the numbers is not important. What's important to us is how the numbers change over time.
To reiterate, this benchmark is really for comparing versions of wine against other versions of wine; it is not intended to be a good or thorough comparison between wine and Windows.