Wine 11.0 uncorks: New WoW64 architecture is complete

The “Windows execution layer” Wine (is not an emulator) has been released in version 11.0. Many small changes and improvements have been incorporated, totaling around 6300 individual changes and over 600 bug fixes.

In their release announcement for Wine 11, the developers particularly highlight support for Linux NTSync and the completion of the new WoW64 architecture. The latter has now achieved functional parity with the old WoW64 mode and also supports 16-bit applications. Old WoW64 installations can be used in the new WoW64 mode by setting the variable WINEARCH=wow64; this requires the prefix to have been created as 64-bit, which is the default behavior. Pure 32-bit prefixes with WINEARCH=win32 are no longer supported. The programmers have removed the wine64 loader and created a single wine loader that selects the correct mode based on the executed file itself. For binary files with 32-bit and 64-bit versions, the loader prefers the 64-bit version.

Wine 11 relies on the Linux NTSync kernel module, if available, to improve the performance of synchronization tools; it has been part of the Linux kernel since 6.14. Wine can now adjust thread priorities under Linux and macOS, with the “nice” limit applying under Linux. On ARM64 systems, Wine can now simulate 4k page sizes on larger page sizes of the host system, typically 16K or 64K. However, according to the developers, the differences can still be completely masked, which could lead to demanding software not running correctly – in such cases, they recommend using a kernel with a 4K page size.

Other minor improvements

In WindowsCodecs, there are now many more conversions between various pixel formats that are supported. Additionally, the programmers have added support for Vulkan API 1.4.335. Several extensions and improvements concern OpenGL. After the last Wine version switched to Wayland by default, Wine 11 further improves integration with X11 window managers. Exclusive fullscreen mode is now supported, and D3D fullscreen mode has been improved. The Wayland driver can now also handle the clipboard.

With “Vulkan Video,” the programmers have implemented hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding using Direct3D-11 video APIs. This naturally requires the Vulkan renderer to be used.

Various other fixes and improvements are listed in the release announcement. They concern, for example, Direct3D helper libraries, input/HID devices, Bluetooth, scanner support (e.g., support for the TWAIN 2.0 API, allowing 64-bit apps to scan), multimedia and DirectMusic, Mono, .Net, and WinRT environments, Internet/Network, databases, bundled applications, or improved internationalization.

Wine 11 is available as a source code tarball for download. However, the Wine developers also provide pre-compiled binary packages on their download page.

About a year ago, Wine 10.0 was released. There, the programmers of the execution layer for Windows programs found the default Wayland support and the FFMPEG backend to be the most important new features.

(dmk)