Comment 12 for bug 902413

I'm running qemu-2.5.0 on ARM, and wine (wine-1.7, 1.8, wine-staging) all seem to behave similarly; rename the winepreloader and you'll be able to run winecfg, notepad run, a few installers do run and the software runs. But Windows software LOVES using threads so you rapidly end up with some other installer firing off at least 6 or 8 threads and things break down. qemu-2.6.0, wine doesn't start.

This is a tricky problem; current qemu has I/O threads, main thread (which is not fully thread-safe, this is what's being worked on...) and user threads; things work as long as some non-thread-safe part is not exercised too hard.

I was beginning to despair, but there actually appears to be intense development activity on qemu branches on 3 fronts --

1) general qemu-multithreading (to make kvm qemu more scalable, let qemu-system-xxx actually use more than one CPU core, instead of simulating x CPU cores on one physical core as it does now). But this also involves fixing thread-safety problems in qemu that affect qemu-user-xxxx.

2) Specifically getting qemu-i386-static threading work on ARM (a few ARM vendors.)

3) Get qemu-arm-static threading working on x86.

It looks like this should get into qemu in due time, maybe it'd be appropriate to call it qemu-3.0 at that point.