Re: Re: 64bit vs. 32bit

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Ross McKay wrote:

> One restriction I know (knew?) of is that you can't run DOS programs
> under Wine on 64-bit, but then... why?

I could be wrong, but I'll bet anything that Wine made use of the now
defunct vm86 component of the x86 architecture.  That allowed the CPU to
implement a "virtual machine" with limited memory to appear as a
separate process to the operating system, and is how most DOS instances
on 32-bit OS's were implemented prior to the x86_64 architecture.

On its way to being phased out, you can now only use vm86 if you boot
the CPU in 32-bit protected mode, so the way DOS is run now is via VM
software like KVM, VMWare, Xen, etc.

Not sure how Wine was implemented though, so I could be very wrong :)

James

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