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From: Mike Jeays <Mike.Jeays@rogers.com>
To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
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Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 13:04:26 -0500
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cc: Chris <cjheinlein@cablespeed.com>
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Subject: Re: Please help if you can
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On Sat, 2005-03-05 at 11:33, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Mike Jeays wrote:
> >>Yes, FreeBSD will run standalone executable code in the various .exe and .dll 
> >>formats, although people often use Wine or a similiar emulator if they want to 
> >>have a more complete Windows environment available while using FreeBSD.
> > 
> > Surely not.  I have never heard it suggested before that FreeBSD will
> > run Windows .exe binaries directly.  I would have thought that you would
> > have to use Wine or Crossover Office.
> 
> Notice the term "standalone".  The overwhelming majority of Windows .exe 
> binaries use DLLs or make system calls which will not work under FreeBSD, 
> which means that even "Hello world" compiled on Windows will not run directly 
> on FreeBSD.  However, something as simple as:
> 
> int foo()
> {
>      return 1 + 2;
> }
> 
> ...gets turned into:
> 
> 0x0 <foo>:      push   %ebp
> 0x1 <foo+1>:    mov    %esp,%ebp
> 0x3 <foo+3>:    mov    $0x3,%eax
> 0x8 <foo+8>:    leave
> 0x9 <foo+9>:    ret
> 0xa <foo+10>:   mov    %esi,%esi
> 
> ...or "5589e5cb8030000009c389f6" in hex.
> 
> x86 assembly is x86 assembly, and this binary sequence if compiled on Windows 
> would still run under FreeBSD.  In practice, people use Wine or developers go 
> to some trouble to integrate the Windows-based dependencies for native 
> software like Flash or video codecs to go, also consider the NDISulator 
> project which uses Windows-based wireless drivers under FreeBSD.

Thanks for the education!  I am still amazed, and will try it for myself
when I have a few minutes.