- Wine, the compatibility layer that allows Windows applications to run on Linux, now has the latest stable release, Wine 8.0 out.
- The release includes over 8,600 changes as the result of a year of hard work as well as 4 years of work devoted to the completion of the conversion to PE format.
- Wine 8.0 incorporates all of the changes made over the past year for the previous versions of development releases.
The Wine team announces that the stable release, Wine 8.0 is now available. The release includes over 8,600 changes as the result of a year of development. Wine specifies that what is special about this release is the completion of the conversion to PE format which took 4 years of work.
What’s new in Wine 8.0
PE modules
- The PE conversion is complete: all modules can be built in PE format. This is an important milestone on the road to supporting various features such as copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers, x86 applications on ARM, etc.
- A special syscall dispatcher is used for PE -> Unix transitions reducing the new architecture’s performance impact, particularly on the OpenGL and Vulkan libraries.
- Building mixed Windows/Unix libraries in ELF format (.dll.so libraries) for use in Winelib applications are still supported but without 32-bit libraries, these applications will be unable to support features enabled by the NT syscall interface, for example, WoW64.
WoW64
- WoW64 thunks are supported by almost all Unix libraries, allowing a 32-bit PE module to call a 64-bit Unix library. Once the remaining direct PE/Unix calls are removed, 32-bit Windows applications can be run without the need for a 32-bit Unix library.
- When the 32-bit Wine loader cannot be found, 32-bit applications run in the new experimental “Windows-like” WoW64 mode (where 32-bit code runs inside a 64-bit host process).
Graphics
- The graphics drivers (winex11.drv, winemac.drv, wineandroid.drv) are converted to run on the Unix side of the syscall boundary, and interface with the Unix side of the Win32u library.
- The Print Processor architecture is implemented. This will be used to avoid direct PE<->Unix calls in the printer driver.
- Effects are supported in Direct2D, including description parsing and several core objects.
- Command lists recording and playback are implemented in Direct2D.
- The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.3.237 of the Vulkan spec.
Direct3D
- Optimizations related to streaming map acceleration are implemented which may result in major performance improvements.
- If an individual setting is specified in both the environment variable and the registry, the former takes precedence.
- The Direct3D graphics card database recognizes more graphics cards.
- The Vulkan renderer limits the maximum Direct3D feature level based on available Vulkan features.
Kernel
- The ApiSetSchema database is implemented, replacing all the api-ms-* forwarding modules. This reduces both disk space and addresses space usage.
Misc
- The OpenAL library is no longer used in Wine 8.0.
To see more of the changes, click here. You can download the update here.
WineHQ Binary Packages: