Wine is a free and open-source compatibility layer to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Developers can compile Windows applications against WineLib to help port them to Unix-like systems. Wine is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues. No code emulation or virtualization occurs. Wine is primarily developed for Linux and macOS.
The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs access API functionality via dynamic-link library (DLL) technology.
Win32s is a 32-bit application runtime environment for the Microsoft Windows 3.1 and 3.11 operating systems. It allowed some 32-bit applications to run on the 16-bit operating system using call thunks. A beta version of Win32s was available in October 1992. Version 1.10 was released in July 1993 simultaneously with Windows NT 3.1.
Windows Console is the infrastructure for console applications in Microsoft Windows. An instance of a Windows Console has a screen buffer and an input buffer. It allows console apps to run inside a window or in hardware text mode. The user can switch between the two using the Alt+↵ Enter key combination. The text mode is unavailable in Windows Vista and later. Starting with Windows 10, however, a native full-screen mode is available.
Phar Lap Software, Inc., was a software company specializing in software development tools for DOS operating systems. The company was named after the champion New Zealand racehorse Phar Lap. They were most noted for their software allowing developers to access memory beyond the 640 KiB limit of DOS and were an author of the VCPI standard.
The architecture of Windows NT, a line of operating systems produced and sold by Microsoft, is a layered design that consists of two main components, user mode and kernel mode. It is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system, which has been designed to work with uniprocessor and symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP)-based computers. To process input/output (I/O) requests, it uses packet-driven I/O, which utilizes I/O request packets (IRPs) and asynchronous I/O. Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft began making 64-bit versions of Windows available; before this, there were only 32-bit versions of these operating systems.
Winlogon is the component of Microsoft Windows operating systems that is responsible for handling the secure attention sequence, loading the user profile on logon, creates the desktops for the window station, and optionally locking the computer when a screensaver is running. The roles and responsibilities of Winlogon have changed significantly in Windows Vista and later operating systems.
A dynamic-link library (DLL) is a shared library in the Microsoft Windows or OS/2 operating system.
ntoskrnl.exe, also known as the kernel image, contains the kernel and executive layers of the Microsoft Windows NT kernel, and is responsible for hardware abstraction, process handling, and memory management. In addition to the kernel and executive layers, it contains the cache manager, security reference monitor, memory manager, scheduler (Dispatcher), and blue screen of death.
A hybrid kernel is an operating system kernel whose architecture attempts to combine aspects and benefits of microkernel and monolithic kernel architectures used in operating systems.
The Session Manager Subsystem, or smss.exe, is a component of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems, starting in Windows NT 3.1. It is executed during the startup process of those operating systems.
The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems employ some specific exception handling mechanisms.
The Microsoft Windows operating system supports a form of shared libraries known as "dynamic-link libraries", which are code libraries that can be used by multiple processes while only one copy is loaded into memory. This article provides an overview of the core libraries that are included with every modern Windows installation, on top of which most Windows applications are built.
The Client/Server Runtime Subsystem, or csrss.exe, is a component of the Windows NT family of operating systems that provides the user mode side of the Win32 subsystem. In modern versions of Windows, it is primarily involved with process and thread management, console window handling, side-by-side assembly loading and the shutdown process. Historically, it had also been responsible for window management and graphics rendering, however, these operations have been moved to kernel mode starting with Windows NT 4.0 to improve performance.
windows.h is a source code header file that Microsoft provides for the development of programs that access the Windows API (WinAPI) via C language syntax. It declares the WinAPI functions, associated data types and common macros.
The booting process of Microsoft Windows varies between different releases.
The Windows 9x series of operating systems refers to a series of Microsoft Windows operating systems produced from 1995 to 2000. They are based on the Windows 95 kernel which is a monolithic kernel. The basic code is similar in function to MS-DOS. They are 16-/32-bit hybrids and require support from MS-DOS to operate.
In computing the Process Environment Block is a data structure in the Windows NT operating system family. It is an opaque data structure that is used by the operating system internally, most of whose fields are not intended for use by anything other than the operating system. Microsoft notes, in its MSDN Library documentation — which documents only a few of the fields — that the structure "may be altered in future versions of Windows". The PEB contains data structures that apply across a whole process, including global context, startup parameters, data structures for the program image loader, the program image base address, and synchronization objects used to provide mutual exclusion for process-wide data structures.
The System Service Descriptor Table (SSDT) is an internal dispatch table within Microsoft Windows.
Longene is a Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux. As of 1.0-rc2, it consists of a Linux kernel module implementing aspects of the Windows kernel and a modified Wine distribution designed to take advantage of the more native interface. Longene is written in the C programming language and is free and open source software. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).
