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« on: March 26, 2025, 04:26:35 am »
Hi Martin, no expert but my take,
#1, a DosCall1.dll is a big part of the communicating with the kernel, which presents as DosCalls.dll or such. DosCall1.dll would have to communicate with whatever part of Linux manages memory amongst other things.
Also the kernel takes care of loading exe's and dll's, need something to do the same, including doing the fixups. Likely there is WINE code that could be repurposed as Win32 and OS/2 exe's and dll's aren't that different.
#2, guess need to hook into the Linux drivers and present the same stuff in the DLL's as is usual.
#3, I think should be able to load LX binaries, also LE and NE. Once again WINE does similar already, even supports NE binaries I believe.
As for 16 bit, there's still 16bit code in OS/2, especially the low level stuff including DosCall1.dll. WINE runs 16 bit Windows code, perhaps once again ideas from that?
While about it, can look at how WINE supports WIN terminal apps and maybe the same can be done for OS/2 VIO apps. We'd lose full screen support, not much uses it anyways. Linux has a VDM, though not as good as ours as well, or at least it did.
The Presentation Manager would mean mapping PM windows to whatever Linux is using, X11 or Wayland. WPS might be the hardest to support.