Wine 10.0 activates Wayland support and brings a new multimedia backend

The Windows emulator Wine has been released in version 10.0 and brings many small changes. The software for using Windows programs under Linux and macOS offers Wayland support enabled by default, optimizes the display of programs and lets you try out a new multimedia backend based on FFMPEG.

After the final spurt of the developers for this week's Wine 10.0 release was already expected on Monday, they actually got down to business on Tuesday evening. The Wine release notes summarize the most important changes in the new version. There are more than 6000 changes in total, some of which are major.

Extended ARM support and improved graphics

The Wine project highlights the support for the ARM64EC interface (apps for ARM processor architecture under Windows 11), which catches up with the previous ARM64 support (Windows 10 for ARM). Support for hybrid ARM64X modules also allows the two code forms to be mixed – but requires an experimental LLVM toolchain. The developers have also implemented 64-bit x86 emulation for ARM64 processor architectures. However, interested parties must do this themselves: Wine does not come with an emulation library, but uses the one specified in the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Wow64\amd64. The FEX emulator provides the necessary interface when it is compiled for ARM64EC. ARM64 support requires a system with page size 4K because the Windows binary interface specifies this – does not (yet) work under a kernel with 16K or 64K pages.

The Wayland driver is active by default. However, Wine 10.0 prefers the X11 driver if it has also been activated – To force the use of Wayland, the DISPLAY environment variable must be deleted (unset). Pop-up windows appear in the right place in most cases, and the driver now also supports OpenGL and automatic key repetitions.

In general, high-DPI support should be implemented more correctly. Child Windows apps can now not only use OpenGL for 3D rendering in the X11 backend, but also Vulkan. The driver supports up to version 1.4.303 of the specification, as well as the video extensions. Direct3D support has been fine-tuned, as have the associated help libraries. Wine users can optionally use a new, still experimental mode-setting mechanism. Instead of adjusting the screen settings, it emulates the changes completely. If necessary, the mechanism scales and fills windows to fit the physical display. If a process crashes without correctly resetting the screen settings, they are now reset to the default settings. There is also a control panel applet “desk-cpl” that can be used to check and change the screen settings.

As an alternative to the existing GStreamer multimedia backend, the developers have developed a new, optional FFMPEG-based backend. It is experimental and still requires some adjustments, especially for playback with D3D. The Media Foundation's multimedia pipelines are now more accurately programmed, which benefits apps that access individual demuxing and decoding components. DirectMusic in Wine can now also load MIDI files.

There have also been improvements to Internet and network support. MSHTML in particular has undergone many changes and should therefore be more compatible. RPC and COM calls are also fully supported under ARM64. The developers have also implemented the elevation of process rights in the kernel – Processes run as normal users by default and can be elevated to admin level if required. As the implementation of this broke in Wine 9.0, the asynchronous waiting for events from serial interfaces has been reprogrammed. New vector extensions such as AVX-512 are also supported.

The programmers have reimplemented the input processing of the Wine command prompt to eliminate long-standing problems. The “sort” application is new. “wmic”, on the other hand, has been given an interactive mode. The ODBC library allows the loading of Windows ODBC drivers, in addition to the previously supported Unix drivers, such as libodbc. DirectPlay now also supports network sessions.

The Wine fork Proton, which is included with the Steam gaming platform, should also be updated to the new version shortly. An update is also expected for CrossOver.

The WINE 9.0 release saw the light of day almost exactly one year ago. One of the outstanding features of this version was the stable support of 32-bit programs on 64-bit systems using the WOW64 abstraction layer.

(dmk)