Wine 9.7 Works On Build System For ARM64X, Other ARM Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 9.7 Works On Build System For ARM64X, Other ARM Improvements

Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-9.7-Released

[middy]

well, what do you do? slow down? wait till conditions improve?

[quaz0r]

wait for conditions to improve

[ssokolow]

Wow. There's a game I hadn't expected to see... takes me back to the copy we received with our HP Pavilion 8160 in 1997.

[mirmirmir]

It's nice to have arm wine, but just how many windows arm software out there? I can imagine FOSSes run natively on arm, but most of them support Linux anyway, so what kind of software can I expect to run arm wine with?

[dragorth]

It's nice to have arm wine, but just how many windows arm software out there? I can imagine FOSSes run natively on arm, but most of them support Linux anyway, so what kind of software can I expect to run arm wine with?

Isn't there a project that uses this Wine and an x86 emulator to run Windows games and apps under ARM64 Systems?

[iyes]

Probably the best-performing emulator for x86 on 64-bit Arm these days is FEX-Emu. It is also the emulator of choice for the people who are trying to get x86 software and games working on Asahi Linux.

It supports using the hardware TSO mode if available. This is the "hardware magic" that allows for the performant Rosetta2 emulation in macOS on Apple Silicon. AFAIK, the new Qualcomm and maybe some other fancy new Arm CPUs will also add such a mode.

It also supports adding "thunk libs" to call the host system's native OpenGL/Vulkan/etc drivers and other common system libraries, so they don't need to be emulated, much improving performance.

I am pretty sure Wine/Proton should work fine under such a setup, allowing you to play games on Arm. If you are interested in this, this is probably your most technically-advanced and performant option.

If you are on Asahi Linux, however, there are caveats due to page size. The Linux kernel uses a fixed page size that is configured at compile time, meaning it cannot just run some apps with a different page size, the way macOS/Mach can. x86 emulation requires a 4K page size, but Apple's hardware works best with a 16K page size. Asahi's default kernels are configured with 16K to give you the best performance for native Arm software. If you want to run a x86 emulator, you need a 4K kernel (should be available to install from the repos), but that will degrade the performance of native Arm stuff / your whole system.

AFAIK some people are experimenting with microVMs, to run a 4K kernel in a lightweight virtual machine that can passthrough stuff to the host, so that you can use a 16K kernel on the host and also run x86 emulation. I don't know what the current state of that is, let's wait for news and updates.

Other Arm hardware shouldn't have such issues, as most of them are designed to use a 4K page size and that is what most Arm Linux distros use by default.

[Weasel]

It's nice to have arm wine, but just how many windows arm software out there? I can imagine FOSSes run natively on arm, but most of them support Linux anyway, so what kind of software can I expect to run arm wine with?

Pretty sure it's for stupid macs.

[DMJC]

I just wish there was a way to run 16 bit color software on 32-bit color display servers. WINE doesn't currently do this, and I don't think there are any plans to do it on Wayland either.

[StarterX4]

It's nice to have arm wine, but just how many windows arm software out there? I can imagine FOSSes run natively on arm, but most of them support Linux anyway, so what kind of software can I expect to run arm wine with?

Just wait for it. Market is on it's verge to switch from x64 to arm64. Once there will be a considerable share for arm64, you'll see some software solely for Windows, from usually small companies that are either lazy enough or use some weird/legacy libraries to not build it also for Linux.