some questions about 'winedevice.exe' and 'dosdevices' dir

[GhettoGirl]

Hi, I have some minor questions about the 'winedevice.exe' process and the 'dosdevices' folder.

But first: How "I" use wine, to understand why I have these questions.
I create a new WINEPREFIX for almost everything. I have my own folder where ALL the WINEPREFIXes goes in -> /wine (current there are 16 prefixes, 7 are 64-bit the rest is 32-bit)
I'm doing this because I DON'T WANT TO BREAK WORKING programs and games AND to get the BEST out of every program or game. (:
I also don't want WINE to symlink my system enviroment ($HOME) and / as Z: drive so I wrote my own program called wine-postconf to automatically remove ALL the useless symlinks and create a 'lock' file in in it, because when the folders are empty wine removes it and replaces it with a symlink again - are you serious wine developers??? I also don't like winemenubuilder.exe - imo there should be a GLOBAL user option to disable it (~/.wine-globals or something like that), but that's an other story... for now a simple DLLOverride does the trick
What I'm also doing is execute 'chattr +i dosdevices' in every prefix to prevent wine to link drives (may it a disc drive, usb, whatever...) - I HATE THIS BEHAVIOR

So now to my questions
1. What winedevice.exe is exactly doing? I noticed disabling does not break anything [DLLOverride winedevice.exe = disable] - can it be that this process creates all the symlinks in dosdevices or is this managed by the wineserver?
2. Is there a more elegant way to prevent wine to symlink my system evironment, other than to add the immutable flag to the 'dosdevices' directory?
3. Why does winedevice.exe causes 20~30+% CPU usage when I set the immutable flag to the dosdevices directory??? - whats going on internally?

I'm looking forward to the future of wine and its development and I hope that wine someday may offer an more sandbox-like feature. Keep up the good work.

[dimesio]

I also don't like winemenubuilder.exe - imo there should be a GLOBAL user option to disable it

Add

Code: Select all

WINEDLLOVERRIDES=winemenubuilder.exe=d

to your .bashrc.

2. Is there a more elegant way to prevent wine to symlink my system evironment, other than to add the immutable flag to the 'dosdevices' directory?

I believe winetricks sandbox does what you want. You will have to run it on each wineprefix. Keep in mind that removing the z: symlink is not supported and the wineprefixes you do that to are considered broken, so before asking for help or reporting bugs please retest in an unaltered wineprefix.

[GhettoGirl]

thanks for that quick reply

adding this line to the environment variable did the trick to get rid of winemenubuilder.exe

unfortunately the sandbox option of winetricks doesn't survive a wine version change (I mean when you use a different version of wine for this prefix, eg: updated version of wine) - the program I wrote is much better because it creates 'lock' files.
also I didn't noticed any changes regarding dosdevices after applying the sadbox option from winetricks wine still symlinks devices I plug in (usb, discs, etc.)