YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Wine Ported to OpenBSD

158 points iamnothere 2 hours ago 30 comments

ndbe 1 hour ago | parent

Insane work!

There's even the remaster of The Witcher running! If I had money I would simply gift to those guys.

throwaway27448 55 minutes ago | parent

Out of curiosity, how much work/what sorts of openbsd-specific details must be addressed to get such a port working?

coldpie 20 minutes ago | parent

You can download the attachment and take a look at the patches. Wine already supports FreeBSD and macOS, so it's not tooooo crazy hard to add another BSD/Unix to the pile. Looks like there's a few Unix APIs that have drifted, so the patches add some #if OpenBSD style stuff to avoid using some symbols that don't exist on OpenBSD. The gs register stuff is by far the most complex bit. IIRC that register is used for thread-local storage on Windows, but for other purposes on other OS's, so handling access from win32 binaries to the gs register is a big problem when porting to a new OS.

On the whole it looks well written to me, especially with how complex & low-level these areas of Wine are. Good work to the author. I'd encourage them to try upstreaming it if they're interested. Some of it looks a little hacky, which upstream will object to, but maybe they could get some help cleaning it up, which will avoid having to maintain a diff and result in an even better port.

Edit: Oh, looks like they already talked with upstream https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=179241414029592 It's not a huge diff to maintain, so maybe that is the better route. Great work either way.

Bluescreenbuddy 52 minutes ago | parent

Good lord this is awesome

ericfrederich 52 minutes ago | parent

My first thought was this must have something to do with the development momentum around the PS5 but that apparently runs FreeBSD not OpenBSD.

CodeCompost 52 minutes ago | parent

That is awesome. I take it I can't run this with nVidia.

ninjin 17 minutes ago | parent

Nvidia support for OpenBSD is not really a thing [1]. With AMD and Intel, you have support for modern hardware in the tree [2,3].

[1]: https://man.openbsd.org/nv

[2]: https://man.openbsd.org/amdgpu

[3]: https://man.openbsd.org/intel

RunSet 46 minutes ago | parent

Especially welcome news now that OpenBSD is shaping up to be a refuge from slopcode.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177411620801633&w=2

smlacy 27 minutes ago | parent

Wow, I honestly didn't think HN would succumb to the AI := Slop perspective.

lionkor 23 minutes ago | parent

I think it's the complete saturation of the platform with members who make it feel like HN is a platform for people to boast about how many tokens they burnt to rewrite something that already worked fine.

It polarizes people to either join the "the LLM is my god" crowd or the "if AI touches the repo, it's all slop" crowd.

The careful balance is rarely discussed, probably because that's the part that still takes work.

kingcauchy 16 minutes ago | parent

It really depends on the post anymore. Have had a lot of really thoughtful discussions about the nuance that came out of HN convos. Seems like most businesses and people are still just trying to figure out.

greyw 27 minutes ago | parent

OpenBSD will probably fall even further behind

freedomben 12 minutes ago | parent

Yep, drivers are one of if not the biggest blocker in my experience, and that's an area AI can help immensely

vdombr 5 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, they won't have a chance to rewrite cp and mv in Rust.

BlackRabbit1 43 minutes ago | parent

Finally I can run Zonealarm on OBSD

timcobb 40 minutes ago | parent

Kaspersky though

GuinansEyebrows 10 minutes ago | parent

Still waiting on 64-bit BonziBuddy...

philipallstar 26 minutes ago | parent

Missed opportunity to call it Port.

kingcauchy 18 minutes ago | parent

Probable being reserved for the OpenBrandSherryDaquiri rebranding.

brynet 25 minutes ago | parent

I OK'd this port. I apologize in advance.

t-3 24 minutes ago | parent

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=179241414029592

> I doubt much will be merged upstream. Many updates we have can technically run on other OSes (%gs stubs won't be built on Linux because %gs is correctly set, SIGUSR1 will work but less optimally, etc). However I picked an approach where everything that is done for OpenBSD is just marked as OpenBSD only. I did that purely to simplify my life while I was working on it and clearly mark the changes.

> When I was talking to Wine maintainers a month ago, they were hesitant to accept even patching Wine so it compiles for OpenBSD, mostly because it's another OS they will have to support and keep operational, while the %gs stub fix is something they definitely cannot take upstream. They are very hesitant to take anything that is changing the "emulated" application code.

saurilabs 21 minutes ago | parent

This is awessome!

imagetic 12 minutes ago | parent

Yes. More of this.

j45 7 minutes ago | parent

I remember reading once how far away something like this way to work - for all the time that BSD has kept servers and networks safer than other options, it's nice to see things like WINE making it there as well.

Its hard to not think of the possibility that BSD might offer new or different advantages to keeping legacy windows applications safe until there is a willingness to adopt or develop alternatives.

raverbashing 4 minutes ago | parent

I wonder what's the state of 3D/OpenGL support on OpenBSD or if the games run into too many problems here