Nik Clayton
2001-Dec-11 17:41 UTC
Wine 2001.11.08, FreeBSD 4.{2,4}, Lightwave 5.6 Screamernet Node
Sorry for the limited detail here. To make matters worse, I don't have access to the machines in question any more. But perhaps someone would be able to give me some pointers to useful avenues to pursue. I'm trying to use Wine on FreeBSD (versions 4.2 and 4.4), to act as a Lightwave 5.6 render node, using Lightwave's ScreamerNet software. The software is for NT 4.0. This software works by having a central "controller". The controller share's it's C: drive to everyone else on the network[1]. The clients (nodes), map this share to a drive letter (e.g., Z:, and it's not enough to use UNC paths, you have to do the mapping). Then they run a program from the Z: drive, giving it a couple of parameters that point back to the share. A typical invocation on the first node would be (after sharing C: on the controller as c_drive) C:\> net use z: \\controller\c_drive C:\> z: Z:\> newtek\programs\lwsn.exe -2 z:\newtek\programs\job1 \ z:\newtek\programs\ack1 The second node uses ...\job2 and ...\ack2, and so on, for each additional node. The controller and the nodes co-ordinate with one another by reading and writing to these files. lwsn.exe is an NT console application, it doesn't use the GUI. Notice that none of the Lightwave software is stored on the render node -- it's all stored on the server. After running lwsn.exe on each node, you then kick off the rendering on the controller. The controller hands frames out to the nodes, and reports on their progress (i.e., which frame each node is on, and so forth). I have installed Wine on FreeBSD using the package for Wine 2001.11.08. I've set this up so /usr/local/wine/drive_c is the C: drive for Windows applications, and created a TEMP and WINNT directory in there. I've populated the WINNT directory with a complete clone of an NT 4 host, patched to service patch 4. I've installed smbfs on FreeBSD. This lets me mount SMB shares as Unix file systems. I've mounted \\controller\c_drive as /usr/local/wine/drive_z. This works in FreeBSD. I can read and write to files under that path, and they are created on the controller's hard disk, as expected. I've run "wine --winver nt40 notepad.exe", and that works fine. Notepad is able to read and write files on the 'local' C: drive, and the Z: drive, and those files appear in the Unix file system as expected -- in the case of the Z: drive they appear on the controller as well. So far so good. So I create a test scene in Lightwave. The scene contains a description of all the objects in the scene, their position, and so forth. The scene *also* specifies where the frames rendered by each node are going to go. For the time being, I turn this off. Effectively, this means that each node is going to render each frame it's given, but is not going to write the results to disk. Instead, it chews through the frame, and then dumps it, moving on to the next frame. However, lwsn.exe is *still* going to write to the Z: drive, as it needs to update the job? and ack? files that are mentioned on the command line. I then run lwsn.exe on an NT node (using the command line above), and run it on FreeBSD like this: # wine --winver nt40 -- z:/newtek/programs/lwsn.exe -2 \ z:/newtek/programs/job2 z:/newtek/programs/ack2 lwsn starts up on both hosts, and prints it's usual diagnostic information that tells me it's waiting for input from the controller. Then it sits in a loop waiting for input. On the controller, I initialise Screamernet, which correctly finds both nodes (one running NT, one running FreeBSD). It assigns the frames to each node, and I start the render. Both copies of lwsn start processing the files, updating the job? and ack? files, and so forth. But they don't render any finished frames. This works fine. I can see that the FreeBSD machine is successfully loading the scene file, the objects, and so on (which all come from the Z: drive -> /usr/local/wine/drive_z -> \\controller\c_drive). It seems to be doing the render correctly (it's taking the same amount of time as the NT node), and it successfully tells the controller when it's finished a frame and needs a new one. So as far as I can tell Wine is doing the right thing, the Screamernet is set up correctly, and lwsn can read and write to the Z: drive with no problems. CPU usage goes up to 99% during the render (which is expected), and so forth. Feeling bouyed by success, I stop the render, shut down all the machines, and bring them up cleanly again. This time, I change the scene file, so that the finished frames will be written to z:\newtek\renders. I create this directory on the controller, and I make sure that both the NT and FreeBSD node can write to it; # cd /usr/local/wine/drive_z/Newtek/Renders # touch foo works, as does using notepad.exe to create a file in there. I save the scene file, and run a copy of lwsn.exe on the NT and FreeBSD nodes. So the only thing that has change is that the scene now specifies where to save the finished images. The NT node does this with no problems. It processes the first frame it's given, writes it, then takes the next one from the controller. The FreeBSD node doesn't. The last few lines of output when rendering the first frame it's given are: ... Integrating pixels. Rendering frame 1, segment 2/2, pass 1/1. Computing lens flare for Light (4). Integrating pixels. Writing RGB data to image file. wine: Unhandled exception, starting debugger.. All but the last three lines are identical to the previous run (where no finished frames were saved). As you can see, it gets to the point where it should be writing the image data, and then Wine throws an "Unhandled exception", and hangs. Ctrl-C returns me to the prompt. I can reproduce this 100% reliably. If I go back in to the scene file and make sure that the frames are not finished, everything works as it should -- of course, if I do that then it's not terribly useful as a render farm. I'm confident it's not smbfs that's causing the problem. Firstly, because the job? and ack? files are updated correctly, and tests with notepad show that apps running under Wine can write to Z: with no problems. Secondly, because I've tried with a scene file that specifies that finished frames should be written to the C: drive instead. But Wine still crashes at the same spot in the process. Anyone got this working? A web search didn't turn up anything useful. I've looked at the Wine Troubleshooting Guide, which didn't seem to have anything that looked pertinent. The Wine Debugging Guide is (sadly) mostly empty at the moment, and the FAQ and Installation documentation don't cover this sort of thing either. I've had a look at the Codeweavers AppDB, which lists Lightwave as working, but says nothing about the Screamernet component being tested. A groups.google.com search for "wine lightwave screamernet" shows lots of people asking whether it can be done, but no actual success stories that I can see. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. N -- FreeBSD: The Power to Serve http://www.freebsd.org/ FreeBSD Documentation Project http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/ --- 15B8 3FFC DDB4 34B0 AA5F 94B7 93A8 0764 2C37 E375 --- -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 238 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-users/attachments/20011211/62d5734f/attachment.pgp