Marcus Meissner posted that Alexandre Julliard got interviewed by Olinux. Not too many surprizing items, except for a potential first release this year...

Patrik Stridvall continued his effort to port Wine code to compile with a compiler different from GCC. One of his proposed fix contained a change in the shared libraries symbol loading. Ulrich Weigand disagreed on the proposal (replacing GOTOFF by GOT): The linker/loader maintain a global offset table, which consists of an array of pointers to exported variables. All access to those variables is supposed to go through these pointers, if the variable could reside within another dynamic object.

If 'variable' is an exported symbol, then 'variable@GOT' is replaced by the linker with a constant: the offset of the GOT slot containing the pointer to variable. So, if the %ebx register contains the start address of the GOT, you can retrieve this pointer via

movl variable@GOT(%ebx), %eax

If you want the value of the variable, you need another indirection:

movl (%eax), %eax

If you know, however, that the variable in question must reside in the same dynamic object as the user, then you can avoid that double indirection, by using the GOTOFF facility. 'variable@GOTOFF' is replaced by the linker with another constant: the difference between the absolute address of the variable and the address of the global offset table (of the current dynamic object). Thus, you can retrieve the value of the variable in one step using:

movl variable@GOTOFF(%ebx), %eax

However, it turned out that GOTOFF was not available with Solaris tools (only GOT is proposed). Anyway, Patrik had now a proper fix (with the double indirection). He reported: Now both MSHearts and WinMine work on Solaris too (with the same shell32 problem Ed. note: as on Linux). :-)