SummerOfCode

Contents

  1. Google Summer of Code 2011
  2. Wine and the Google Summer of Code
  3. Beware of Legal Requirements
  4. Ideas
    1. Your own idea
    2. Kernel - implement message-mode pipes
    3. Security - implement sandboxing
    4. Encryption - implement a DSS provider
    5. System Management - Improve WMI support
    6. Tools - Merge winecfg and control panel
    7. Tools - Implement new control panel applets
    8. Theming - Implement Wine theming support
    9. DirectInput - Implement missing DirectInput8 features
    10. Direct3D - Implement missing D3D9_xx DLLs
    11. Direct3D - Conformance / Performance / Interactive tests
    12. Richedit - implement Windowless mode
    13. Test Suite
    14. CMD - implement more robust parser
    15. Cygwin - improve cygwin support under Wine
    16. NTDLL - support performance registry keys
    17. Improve dxdiag and/or dxdiagn
    18. Implement the Explorer
    19. Winelib Aware Scons (or cmake)
    20. Cleanup Winemenubuilder to support generating Application Bundles on Mac OS X
    21. Xinput / Xbox 360 controller compatibility
    22. Implement Open MP (vcomp.dll)

Google Summer of Code 2011

It's that time again! See the official Google Summer of Code site for tips on how to participate.

This page collects some tips for students who want to work on Wine during the Summer of Code, and provides a few ideas for projects.

Wine and the Google Summer of Code

Beware of Legal Requirements

You must state that you will follow these minimal legal requirements during the SoC (and have done so in the past):

  • You are not allowed to read or reuse Windows source code (leaked source / Windows Research Kernel* / ...)

  • (* we are following the SFLC's advice)

  • You are not allowed to reverse engineer Windows files by disassembling or decompiling them

  • You are not allowed to analyze Windows files with the trace functions of Wine

  • People who work or have worked for Microsoft should probably not participate

Ideas

Your own idea

Possible mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

  • If you have an idea, please post it on Wine Developers mailing list so we can help you with your idea and find out if it's realistic or not. Showing initiative and willing to discuss your idea greatly improves your chances of getting accepted. Even more so than taking one of the ideas below.

  • As long as you work hard and interact with the community and your mentor in a positive and constructive way you don't have to worry about not meeting all your goals.

Kernel - implement message-mode pipes

Possible Mentors: TBD

Security - implement sandboxing

Possible Mentors: DanKegel

Encryption - implement a DSS provider

Possible Mentors: JuanLang, DanKegel

  • Some .net apps, e.g. Miner Wars, need DSS for their autoupdater

  • Juan says "I believe it'd mostly be a case of copy and paste from rsaenh, replacing the protocols as necessary (and inserting calls to libtomcrypt, which) actually has support for the DSS-related protocols, and it isn't heavyweight like a lot of libraries."

  • See also http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa381986%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

System Management - Improve WMI support

Possible Mentors: DanKegel

Tools - Merge winecfg and control panel

Possible Mentors: DanKegel

  • Wine has a control panel, but it doesn't come with many pre-installed applets.

  • Wine's winecfg tool is a kind of control panel, but it only handles its own hardcoded applets, not real control panel applets. Why not? Let's unify them.

  • Looks like pure_evil at mail.bg has gotten started on this; he's got a script that splits winecfg apart into control panel applets...

  • Owen Rudge split out the Desktop Integration tab into its own control panel, but it hasn't been merged with WineHQ yet. (See here.)

Tools - Implement new control panel applets

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

  • Basic 3D and screen resizing (tests X 3D drivers via OpenGL from Wine, or verifies that Wine was compiled with OpenGL support)

  • Current network IP addresses, see IPaddress for inspiration

  • List of fonts, see FontPage for inspiration

  • Improve the Internet Explorer control panel: Configure proxy and cache settings and more.

Theming - Implement Wine theming support

Possible Mentors: ReeceDunn, RoderickColenbrander, AndreHentschel

Windows XP improved theming support in Windows with support for skinning controls with bitmaps, alphablending, shadowing and other forms of eye-candy. Theming support was achieved by shipping new versions of comdlg32/comctl32 with Windows which under the hood use uxtheme.dll for reading theme files (.msstyles file).

Wine has support for loading themes using uxtheme. This theming code is called from the wine common controls code (comctl32). Currently, the drawing procedure of a control is overridden by a themed drawing version by subclassing. This is not the way it is implemented on Windows and this causes drawing issues and other nasty issues. Instead each control needs to be reimplemented in comctl32 when a program requests theming (it does this using a manifest). The goal of this project would be to implement theming support in comctl32 and get an XP theme working this way.

Some info about XP theming can be found here along with a sample theme project.

DirectInput - Implement missing DirectInput8 features

Possible Mentors: MarcusMeissner

Direct3D - Implement missing D3D9_xx DLLs

Possible Mentors: RoderickColenbrander

  • D3D comes with lots of numbered DLLs (e.g. d3dx9_36). These aren't as mysterious as they sound. They contain utility functions to make life easier for developers. For instance they contain math functions, functions for loading bitmaps, compiling shaders and much more. These days matrix math and some other parts have been implemented but most functionality is still missing. The work would consist of adding missing functions (I would choose a few simple demos or games and get those working) and writing behavioral tests to verify that the functions work correctly. It probably wouldn't be too hard to support the ones lots of games use, see D3DX

Direct3D - Conformance / Performance / Interactive tests

Possible Mentors: DanKegel

  • Even small demos show interesting problems in Wine (see e.g. http://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=3drad, http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21817 )

  • There are lots of tools (see http://wiki.winehq.org/GameEngines ) that make developing tiny games easy; they often come with tutorials or examples that might let you isolate problems

  • We would like to capture the problems these expose by writing conformance tests (possibly WINETEST_INTERACTIVE ones, if they can't be automated) or performance test tools (as part of programs/dxdiag, perhaps; see "Make dxdiag usable" below, and yagmark), or at the very least bug reports
  • It'd be nice to also fix some of the problems, too. For instance, figuring out why wine is slow at some app, and then fixing it, would be great.

Richedit - implement Windowless mode

Possible Mentors: MaartenLankhorst

  • Richedit is supposed to support Windowless mode, and a number of apps use this. Wine has mostly a stub implementation, so there's lots of room for improvement. Maarten promises to help you with any COM problems you run into :)

  • DylanSmith has been working on this, after the SoC 2008 (See bug 5162).

Test Suite

Possible Mentors: DanKegel, AustinEnglish

  • Wine can only do rapid releases thanks to its test suite, but our test suite could be so much better.

  • UnitTestSuites documents several open source Windows apps that build properly under Wine, and many more than might not.

  • Dan Kegel spent a couple weeks automating the build of Chromium and filing bugs for all the problems that turned up; see BuildAndTestChromium. Doing something similar for another app or two would be great.

  • Dan Kegel et al wrote an automated app installer wisotool and then folded it into winetricks-alpha (see http://winetricks.org ). Extending this to handle more apps, or to actually test the existing apps (instead of just their installers) might be very useful.

  • Appinstall, created by Austin English in GSoC 2009, which allows automated testing of real Windows apps. Expanding this would be great.

  • It would be great if somebody went through the unattended install scripts at http://wpkg.org and converted them into AppInstall tests. (This idea doesn't even require any C programming.) See discussion at http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2008-March/063785.html for more details.

  • Other possible sources of debugged unattended installation scripts include http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.playonlinux.com/en/scripts.html. (Potentially wine-doors, too, but their web site is so disorganized I can't tell.)

  • Firefox and OpenOffice have their own test suites; we should run those under Wine. Austin English may have a start on this already, ask him.

  • Creating a Buildbot (see http://buildbot.net) to run all the above daily would be useful.

CMD - implement more robust parser

Possible Mentors: DanKegel, Jason Edmeades

http://kegel.com/wine/sweng/2010/ is a project to fix a number of small bugs in Wine's cmd.exe and friends, and to write testcases for it. It has helped bring to light certain flaws in cmd.exe's parsing of if/then/else and () blocks. Somebody could quite usefully spend a summer bulking up the test cases for cmd and friends, fixing any remaining reported bugs, and improving the parser.

Cygwin - improve cygwin support under Wine

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

  • Wine currently doesn't support Cygwin very well, though several F/OSS programs use it for compiling/testing their Windows builds. Several bugs prevent it from being useful for testing and building, e.g., VLC under Wine.

NTDLL - support performance registry keys

Possible Mentors: DanKegel, OwenRudge

Improve dxdiag and/or dxdiagn

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

  • First thing requested in a forum of a game: Send me the logs of msinfo and dxdiag
  • dxdiag collects system information, and has interactive tests for ddraw, d3d, dsound, and dplay
  • Two ways to go: make native dxdiag gui work better, or implement a builtin dxdiag gui, or both

  • UCLA students are implementing builtin dxdiag gui for wine, see http://www.kegel.com/wine/sweng/2011 and http://code.google.com/p/yadxdiag/

  • Wine-specific tests, like a tiny subset of winetest, might be handy to identify whether the user's wine suffers from common gaming-related bugs

Implement the Explorer

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Winelib Aware Scons (or cmake)

Possible Mentors: Someone in Wine, or someone in the appropriate project (scons but not cmake is a GSoC organizations as well)

  • The goal is to be able to take a visual studio project file for a formerly windows-only program, run it through a magic script, and turn it into a winelib-powered linux-compatible build system.

  • See SconsWine

Cleanup Winemenubuilder to support generating Application Bundles on Mac OS X

Possible Mentors: Steven Edwards

  • There is an initial patch that adds support for building App bundles to launch Windows applications however winemenubuilder needs much more cleanup before this should go in.

http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2009-December/082960.html

Xinput / Xbox 360 controller compatibility

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

There were two follow up threads in relation to this:

Implement Open MP (vcomp.dll)

See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26688 Only two games are known to be affected at the moment. Non-parallel fallback implementations might be useful?

SummerOfCode (last edited 2011-06-17 09:56:15 by MarcusMeissner)