test-wine

Running Windows Application on the EnvoyAI Platform

The EnvoyAI Platofrm does not currently support Windows docker containers, but it still can support many types of windows applications and executables via Wine.

What is Wine

Wine is a very mature open source project that, for the past 25 years, has been developing a solution to run Windows applications on Linux Operating Systems. Wine is capable of running AAA Windows only video games, Intensive professional applications, and has support for all Visual Studio C++ Redistributables. To learn more please visit winehq.org

How to the example works

The docker file installs wine, along with winetricks, which provides an easy to use mechanism to install common dependencies like the VS C++ Resitributables. Because many Windows and thus Wine applications require a GUI, we include Xvfb, which provides a virtual X-Windows display without actual screen output. It can be used to run installers and your application itself with the xvfb-run tool.

HelloWindows is a C++ Windows CLI application created in Visual Studio 2017 on Windows 10 Pro. The application was built in 'Release' mode (not 'Debug' mode, which requires debug versions of the VS C++ redistributables). It performs the exact same task as the test-hello example. Unlike test-hello, because it compiles to a windows .EXE, it cannot be run in a Linux docker container without Wine.

Try with your code

To modify this Dockerfile to run your own exe, you must edit the line below to copy the EXE, along with any required DLLs, to the /prog directory:

ADD HelloWindows/Release /prog

Then edit runWine.sh to call your EXE. As described above we use xvfb-run to run your exe inside of wine:

xvfb-run wine HelloWindows.exe

Potential issue with Windows FilePaths

Windows applications typically use drive letters and back slashes: C:\Data\. Recent versions of windows can accept paths without drive letters and with forward slashes /envoyai/input/. This is especially convenient for our usa, it is suggested that any code that reads inputs, or writes outputs simply use the unix style paths. If files must be access or saved in a different part of the windows filesystem, then it is suggested that the runWine.sh script move files into place before and/or after executing the windows code.

GPU usage in Wine

Wine does have OpenGL and DirectX support, so it is theoretically possible to make sure of a GPU in Wine. However, with the additional complexities of doing this inside of a docker container, this feature is not yet available on the EnvoyAI platform. Please contact us if this is an important feature to you.