With WineConf 2017 going on, Wine [Official Site] founder Alexandre Julliard has given his keynote speech which covers a number of topics which I will summarise for you.
Here's what they're expecting for Wine 3.0:
- Direct3D 11
- Direct3D command stream
- Android driver
- Message-mode pipes
- Version bumped to Windows 7
Roadmap for the future:
- OpenGL Core contexts
- Android packaging
- Code freeze (expected soon)
- 3.0 release (end of year)
- Direct3D 12 / Vulkan
- Wayland driver (they've started working on it)
They're also approaching 4 million lines of code (for those that care about that sort of thing). Sounds like a lot, but it's a rather complicated project of course.
I think that pretty much sums up everything included. If you wish to watch it yourself, you can find the video below:
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Sounds like Wine is going to have a rather bright future, which is good news for those of you not wanting to give up a few Windows games and applications while using Linux.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Sir_Diealot 30 Oct 2017
'rather bright future' is a very optimistic take on this. Yes, there are a bunch of plans, but is there the manpower? It doesn't look like it. I'm a bit shocked that wine-staging seems to be so separate from wine and that so few patches make it into regular wine.
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Does this mean full DX11 support? For example: Could I play then GTA V in DX11 mode?
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Honestly I feel a little guilty that I haven't donated for the Wine project yet.
It's never too late to alleviate your guilt by spending some money. :P
Does this mean full DX11 support? For example: Could I play then GTA V in DX11 mode?
Don't get your hopes up. First of all, working does not necessarily mean working fast. But I imagine there will still be plenty of missing features that are vital for some games. I think you should take it to mean that DX11 is along far enough to run some of the games properly.
With regard to GTA5, last thing I saw was that it was mostly functional with the DX10 option. Not there has been much improvement on that lately.
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'rather bright future' is a very optimistic take on this. Yes, there are a bunch of plans, but is there the manpower? It doesn't look like it. I'm a bit shocked that wine-staging seems to be so separate from wine and that so few patches make it into regular wine.Considering how well Wine has developed over the past year, yeah I'm pretty optimistic about the future of the project.
What makes you say they don't have the manpower?
It seems Wine-Staging discussions are on their agenda.
1 Likes, Who?
cRaZy-bisCuiT 30 Oct 2017
Having wine working on Android would be really awesome! I wonder why no one talks about that. Having old City Builders or RPGs on the tablet could be pretty nice, especially when using Keyboard and mouse.
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Comandante Ñoñardo 30 Oct 2017
Don't worry next January some (non)tech website will say it anyway: "Wine 3.0 is out and ready to disappoint you again."
Honestly I feel a little guilty that I haven't donated for the Wine project yet. I enjoyed so many older games that I though I could never play because I choose to use only Linux. I use it only for games as I don't use any special software, but I am really surprised how many games I can play.
Buying Crossover is a way to support WINe
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Having wine working on Android would be really awesome! I wonder why no one talks about that.Maybe they do on gamingonandroid.com or equivalent. ;)
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That's great, especially Wayland plans.This is a thing that I haven't seen talked about a whole lot, but I am so glad Ubuntu dropped Mir. Everyone talks about them dropping Unity for Gnome, but frankly that doesn't matter much. There's lots of those things and one more or less is no biggie.
But Wayland is the kind of infrastructure it's so much better if there's only one of it, and going forward it could matter quite a lot to Linux gaming that we didn't end up with both Wayland and Mir making things complicated.
3 Likes, Who?
That's great, especially Wayland plans.This is a thing that I haven't seen talked about a whole lot, but I am so glad Ubuntu dropped Mir. Everyone talks about them dropping Unity for Gnome, but frankly that doesn't matter much. There's lots of those things and one more or less is no biggie.
But Wayland is the kind of infrastructure it's so much better if there's only one of it, and going forward it could matter quite a lot to Linux gaming that we didn't end up with both Wayland and Mir making things complicated.
100%. I don't care about their Unity to Gnome switch, but dropping Mir for Wayland is a very good development. If Ubuntu would have kept Mir rift, applications like Wine would have been bogged with the need to implement another huge backend. Now they can focus on Wayland only and progress faster.
Last edited by Shmerl on 30 Oct 2017 at 5:59 pm UTC
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Another switch I'm waiting for is Firefox. They'll probably start seriously working on Wayland support after they'll swap Gecko for WebRender engine.
See:
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/
https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki
Wine and Firefox are two huge ones. After they are done, I'll probably switch to Wayland proper (if they won't work before well with XWayland that is).
Last edited by Shmerl on 30 Oct 2017 at 6:10 pm UTC
See:
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/
https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki
Wine and Firefox are two huge ones. After they are done, I'll probably switch to Wayland proper (if they won't work before well with XWayland that is).
Last edited by Shmerl on 30 Oct 2017 at 6:10 pm UTC
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That's great, especially Wayland plans.This is a thing that I haven't seen talked about a whole lot, but I am so glad Ubuntu dropped Mir. Everyone talks about them dropping Unity for Gnome, but frankly that doesn't matter much. There's lots of those things and one more or less is no biggie.
But Wayland is the kind of infrastructure it's so much better if there's only one of it, and going forward it could matter quite a lot to Linux gaming that we didn't end up with both Wayland and Mir making things complicated.
Yes, I think both are important to remove some of the fragmentation in Linux world, whereas the decision to drop Mir is the more important one. I would even say this applies to systemd and friends too, they are may be not perfect but it helps a lot if there is just one de-facto standard for certain things.
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Please, can someone explain what does it mean "OpenGL Core Contenxt"? Does it mean that I could finally run Rage or Wolfenstein The New Order using Mesa drivers? I'm totally wrong?
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Please, can someone explain what does it mean "OpenGL Core Contenxt"? Does it mean that I could finally run Rage or Wolfenstein The New Order using Mesa drivers? I'm totally wrong?
From what I understood, Wine can use core profile or compact profile already. But to use core profile you need to force it in the registry (that's what I'm doing for the Witcher 3 for example). What they mean is that it will use core profile by default in the future. I suppose they have some bugs to fix before that.
Last edited by Shmerl on 30 Oct 2017 at 7:20 pm UTC
1 Likes, Who?
Don't worry next January some (non)tech website will say it anyway: "Wine 3.0 is out and ready to disappoint you again."
Honestly I feel a little guilty that I haven't donated for the Wine project yet. I enjoyed so many older games that I though I could never play because I choose to use only Linux. I use it only for games as I don't use any special software, but I am really surprised how many games I can play.
What site would that be ?
I feel like I'm living under a rock. Are some outlets bashing wine on purpose ?
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The abbreviated minutes of Wineconf 2017 have been posted now: Wineconf 2017
For those that are interested...
The Hangover project - to run Wine, with high performance, on Aarch64 Arm was very interesting and cool. Essentially Windows x86 code is emulated by a modified version of Qemu - but traps are made on Windows system calls - these then run using native Aarch64 Wine libraries. This requires dual stacks and lots of other fiddling to avoid things falling apart on exceptions and stack unwinding... But the demos worked! The 3D demo had an impressive FPS >120. The global efficiency of this hybrid emulation/translation layer setup obviously depends on the ratio of time spend in x86 code (qemu emulation = slow) vs. Wine library implementation of Windows system calls (runs at native Arm speed).
A variant of this solution code also solve the problem that Apple is planning to fully drop 32-bit library support for MacOS in ~24 months. Since the 32-bit parts of Windows libraries could be emulated. Obviously native 64-bit Windows applications would run at full speed.
The D3D12 demo - running on top of native Linux Vulkan was quite a surprise and very impressive. Basically just a (source code available) Windows D3D12 demo compiled against a new Wine project prototype translation layer library. In what appears to be quite a smart move - this translation layer library is proposed to be separate for Wine itself - but will be hosted on the WineHQ site. So other software will be able to leverage the translation layer - without linking fully against Wine. Wine itself would implement the D3D12.DLL by linking against the translation layer.
The Wine Wayland demo was a bit painful. Alexandre Julliard's obviously put a lot of work into this. So he had a demo of MS Word drawing correctly and the drop menus appearing in the correct places, etc. But there is tonne of papercut issues that are apparently quite hard to solve... Wayland doesn't report where on the screen a Window is (in absolute co-ordinates), etc. back to Wine. So you get currently get artefacts appearing when you move the Window of the edge of the screen and invisible mouse cursor restrictions can appear. So this realistically support for native Wine on Wayland could be decade away... :-(
Last edited by bobbywya on 31 Oct 2017 at 10:27 am UTC
For those that are interested...
The Hangover project - to run Wine, with high performance, on Aarch64 Arm was very interesting and cool. Essentially Windows x86 code is emulated by a modified version of Qemu - but traps are made on Windows system calls - these then run using native Aarch64 Wine libraries. This requires dual stacks and lots of other fiddling to avoid things falling apart on exceptions and stack unwinding... But the demos worked! The 3D demo had an impressive FPS >120. The global efficiency of this hybrid emulation/translation layer setup obviously depends on the ratio of time spend in x86 code (qemu emulation = slow) vs. Wine library implementation of Windows system calls (runs at native Arm speed).
A variant of this solution code also solve the problem that Apple is planning to fully drop 32-bit library support for MacOS in ~24 months. Since the 32-bit parts of Windows libraries could be emulated. Obviously native 64-bit Windows applications would run at full speed.
The D3D12 demo - running on top of native Linux Vulkan was quite a surprise and very impressive. Basically just a (source code available) Windows D3D12 demo compiled against a new Wine project prototype translation layer library. In what appears to be quite a smart move - this translation layer library is proposed to be separate for Wine itself - but will be hosted on the WineHQ site. So other software will be able to leverage the translation layer - without linking fully against Wine. Wine itself would implement the D3D12.DLL by linking against the translation layer.
The Wine Wayland demo was a bit painful. Alexandre Julliard's obviously put a lot of work into this. So he had a demo of MS Word drawing correctly and the drop menus appearing in the correct places, etc. But there is tonne of papercut issues that are apparently quite hard to solve... Wayland doesn't report where on the screen a Window is (in absolute co-ordinates), etc. back to Wine. So you get currently get artefacts appearing when you move the Window of the edge of the screen and invisible mouse cursor restrictions can appear. So this realistically support for native Wine on Wayland could be decade away... :-(
Last edited by bobbywya on 31 Oct 2017 at 10:27 am UTC
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Does this mean full DX11 support? For example: Could I play then GTA V in DX11 mode?
Tomb Raider 2013 works better in DX11 mode than DX9 mode with wine-staging. The game looks better with DX11. DX11 support for TR2013 has been available over 6 months.
But the wine version runs better than the linux version???
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Sir_Diealot 31 Oct 2017
The wayland part is what I don't get at all. Is wayland this broken still?
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