# Status of wow64 in wine?



## cabriofahrer (Aug 14, 2019)

Hi there,

I was wondering what the status of wow64 for wine in FreeBSD is? Does the actual wine-4.0.1_2,1 or wine-devel-4.13_1,1 already support this?


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## shkhln (Aug 14, 2019)

You can't be serious… See the first result in google for "freebsd wine wow64".


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## Alexander88207 (Aug 14, 2019)

Hello, @*cabriofahrer*

It's possible to use 64bit applications with "wine-devel" but you are not able to use a 32bit application.

In theory you must install your application with "i386-wine-devel" in a 32bit prefix then move the application to a 64bit prefix.


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## cabriofahrer (Aug 14, 2019)

Alexander88207 said:


> In theory you must install your application with "i386-wine-devel" in a 32bit prefix then move the application to a 64bit prefix.



Does "move the application" really work? Is the application just installed to one folder, not rather several files also into some "windows system folders" spread within wine?



Wozzeck.Live said:


> Not implemented at this time on FreeBSD plateform, and I wonder if it will happen one day.
> It seems to work on most Linux distros.... we simply install the Wine 64 bit and Wine 32 bit packages side by side, but this is not possible today on FreeBSD.



But is there anybody working on that or not? Any project website that provides information on that matter? I mean the real problem is actually windows programs for 64 bit but with a 32 bit installer??? What sense does that make?



shkhln said:


> See the first result in google for "freebsd wine wow64"



Dates from 2017. This is why am asking.


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## Alexander88207 (Aug 14, 2019)

cabriofahrer said:


> Does "move the application" really work? Is the application just installed to one folder, not rather several files also into some "windows system folders" spread within wine?



Yeah it works for the most applications but  some may saying "please install me again" because there is no entry in the registry.


cabriofahrer said:


> But is there anybody working on that or not? Any project website that provides information on that matter? I mean the real problem is actually windows programs for 64 bit but with a 32 bit installer??? What sense does that make?
> 
> 
> 
> Dates from 2017. This is why am asking.



Here is something from 2018 https://reviews.freebsd.org/D14721


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## shkhln (Aug 14, 2019)

cabriofahrer said:


> Dates from 2017. This is why am asking.



I'm pretty sure D14721 dates from Mar 17 2018. Anyway, D14721 is superseded by D16830, which is also not being worked on. Presumably, dbn (original author) is just too busy or something like that. I have a somewhat more elaborate version of the patch from the latter proposal hosted on GitHub, mostly useful for scaring port committers demonstrating the approach.


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## msplsh (Aug 14, 2019)

The short of it seems to be that

* You can't cross compile ports
* You can't chroot without root
* The latest idea requires a lot of politics involving how to structure ports

Unblocking any of those might get the problem solved


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## shkhln (Aug 14, 2019)

That is a bit counterintuitive, cross-compilation is not directly related to multilib packaging (an actual issue here). For example, Fedora and Debian "simply" reuse i386 packages, it doesn't matter if they were cross-compiled, or built directly on i386 host, or built on x86_64 host in i386 chroot. On other hand, Arch Linux provides separate lib32- packages with their own building instructions, no distinct cross-compilation step involved.


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## msplsh (Aug 14, 2019)

It's not complicated.  Fedora and Debian provide binaries.  That's not how ports works.  Hence, the cross compiling being a bullet point.


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## shkhln (Aug 14, 2019)

msplsh said:


> It's not complicated.  Fedora and Debian provide binaries.  That's not how ports works.  Hence, the cross compiling being a bullet point.



And what would you do with the cross-compiled i386 Wine package? It's still an i386 package, you can't install it on amd64 FreeBSD.


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## msplsh (Aug 14, 2019)

shkhln said:


> And what would you do with cross-compiled i386 Wine package?





shkhln said:


> "simply" reuse i386 packages


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## shkhln (Aug 14, 2019)

msplsh said:


>



Historically, i386 Fedora installs libraries into /usr/lib and x86_64 Fedora installs libraries into /usr/lib64. Thus, i386 packages can be installed into x86_64 system without overwriting 64-bit libraries. Of course, RPM provides some support for installing i386 and x86_64 packages side by side. Debian has a more advanced version of this, it is very elaborate and took them several years to implement.


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## msplsh (Aug 14, 2019)

Now we've wrapped around to the "latest idea" which is 32-bit "coinstalled packages."

Anyway, the answer to the original poster is that the problems are hard than it seems and nobody wants to tackle them. (Presumably because they're all large architectural changes that require buy-in)


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## shkhln (Aug 14, 2019)

I don't really think any of these approaches are hard to implement. It all boils down to the complete lack of interest from existing committers. Which is quite bizarre considering there is already full multilib support in the base system.


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