I mean something a bit different. I mean using PE binaries to store Linux programs, no Wine loader.

Of course, this is a little silly. It would require massively rethinking many aspects of the Linux userland, like the libc design. However, I honestly would be OK with this future. I don't really care that much for ELF or its consequences, and there are PE32+ binaries all over the place anyways, so may as well embrace it. Linux itself is often a PE32+ binary, for the sake of EFI stub/UKI.

(You could also implement this with binfmt_misc, sure, but then you'd still need at least an ELF binary for the init binary and/or a loader.)

(edit: But like I said, it's a little silly. It breaks all kinds of shit. Symbol interposition stops working. The libdl API breaks. You can't LD_PRELOAD. The libpthread trick to make errno a thread local breaks. Etc, etc.)

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direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Wine has no problem loading Linux programs in PE format. It doesn't enforce that you actually call any Windows functions and it doesn't stop you making Linux system calls directly.

	▲	jchw 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well yes, but you'd be spawning a wineserver and running wineboot and all kinds of baggage on top, all for the very simple task of mapping and executing a PE binary, and of course you would still wind up needing ELF... for the Wine loader and all of the dependencies that it has (like a libc, though you could maybe use a statically-linked musl or something to try to minimize it.) Meanwhile the actual process of loading a PE binary is relatively trivial. It's trivial enough that it has been implemented numerous times in different forms by many people. Hell, I've done it numerous times myself, once for game hacking and once in pure Go[1] as a stubborn workaround for another problem. Importing an entire Wine install, or even putting the effort into stripping Wine down for this purpose, seems silly. But I suppose the entire premise is a little silly to begin with, so I guess it's not that unreasonable, it's just not what I am imagining. I'm imagining a Linux userland with simply no ELF at all. [1]: https://github.com/jchv/go-winloader - though it doesn't do linking recursively, since for this particular problem simply calling LoadLibrary is good enough.