James McKenzie, I know you develop for Wine, so you know what you are talking about. Could you please walk me through how Wine is NOT a kernel? Is it because it translates things into Unix program calls, rather than passing them right onto the processor? I already knew that Wine runs in user space as opposed to the reserved kernel space, from a rights perspective of which the processor's "protected mode" reenforces. I also knew that Wine gets all hardware information from the operating system's kernel, so Wine doesn't have all the pieces necessary to be an independent operating system. Is that why you're saying it's not a kernel? Yes, I caught that you said > The reason I state that WINE is not a kernel is because it cannot run any Windows hardware/software drivers. If this were possible, many of the complaints about WINE would not exist. but I just want a more thorough understanding by which to model how Wine works in my head. But from a less strict standpoint, aren't the Windows programs you run in Wine ran through Wine's "kernel", which is further executed by the operating system's REAL kernel? I know that one part of the Wine program is a kernel. It's "ntoskrnl.exe", and it's talked about over here:http://source.winehq.org/WineAPI/ntoskrnl.html Somewhere there is a list of the pieces of Wine, and each piece has a name next to it saying who develops that piece. One of them was the Wine kernel. Over at one of the Wine wiki's, "[The Wine server] can be seen, from a functional point of view, as a NT kernel." - http://www.winehq.org/site/docs/winedev-guide/x2591 Furthermore it manages memory, which is rather kernelesque. I thought that Wine was a kernel without being an operating system. I thought of Wine as a "parasitic operating system" dependent on the host kernel to obtain hardware info and to be passed onto the processor. Can we call Wine a supervisory program? How about a kerneloid? A virtual kernel? A kernel emulator? I'm not trying to prove you wrong, James McKenzie, I just want all these things homogenized into one understanding.
