Can I use Wine to make the Windows driver for my network card / graphics card / scanner / etc. work on Unix?
The goal of Wine is to make it possible to run Windows applications on Unix, not Windows drivers or VxDs. Drivers and Windows applications belong to different worlds. Applications run in user mode and use the APIs provided by the kernel and the other user mode dlls. In contrast, drivers are loaded in the Windows kernel, i.e. in ring 0 instead of ring 3, drivers have to deal with specific memory management issues, and use instructions not available to regular applications. This means they would not be able to run in Wine since Wine runs entirely in user mode. Rather you would have to modify the Linux kernel. But in addition, drivers use a completely different API from regular Windows applications. So the work performed on Wine would not even be of any use for such a project. In other words, making it possible to use Windows drivers or VxDs on Unix would be a completely separate project. However, if you want to reuse Windows drivers on a non-Microsoft operating system we recommend that y
The goal of Wine is to make it possible to run Windows applications on Unix, not Windows drivers or VxDs. Drivers and Windows applications belong to different worlds. Applications run in user mode and use the APIs provided by the kernel and the other user mode dlls. In contrast, drivers are loaded in the Windows kernel, i.e. in ring 0 instead of ring 3, drivers have to deal with specific memory management issues, and use instructions not available to regular applications. This means they would not be able to run in Wine since Wine runs entirely in user mode. Rather you would have to modify the Linux kernel. But in addition, drivers use a completely different API from regular Windows applications. So the work performed on Wine would not even be of any use for such a project. In other words, making it possible to use Windows drivers or VxDs on Unix would be a completely separate project.
