Comment by bmenrigh
23 days ago
Those benchmark numbers are slightly misleading, as they are a comparison of Wine+ntsync against Wine+nothing. There has been a somewhat fast "fsync" library built around Linux's futex and the gains over Wine+fsync are modest (just a few % in most cases).
That said, Wine+ntsync is still a win, just not a 8x improvement like the Dirt 3 benchmark suggests.
(And it case it's not clear, ntsync is https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html, which is a driver for Linux that offers syncronization primitives (mutex, semaphore, events) that more closely match the semantics of the Windows primitives. It's easier to do a direct implementation in Wine to support code compiled for Windows that expects to be talking to an NT kernel.)
Though like the article mentions, fsync doesn't work out of the box (requiring kernel patches).
> There has been a somewhat fast "fsync" library built around Linux's futex
The article actually goes into that in quite a bit of detail about that.
Yeah but to the commenter I was replying to, I don't think it was clear that detail was relevant to the benchmark numbers they were quoting.
Do they have any other usecase behind Wine? My guess would be MS SQL server, but is that correct?
Starting with SQL Server 2017, native Linux support exists. Probably because of Azure.
Ironically, SQL Server AFAIK in order to run on Linux uses what basically amounts to a Microsoft reimplementation of Wine. Which always makes me wonder if they'll ever get rid of Windows altogether someday in favour of using Linux + a Win32 shim. I think there are still somewhat strong incentives nowadays to keep NT around, but I wouldn't be that surprised it this happened sometime down the line.
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