An experimental release of the open implementation of the Win32 API — Wine 9.2 has occurred. Since the release of 9.1, 14 bug reports have been closed and 213 changes have been made.
The most significant changes:
- The Wine Mono engine with .NET platform implementation has been updated to release 9.0.0.
- Improved support for the system tray.
- Exception handling has been enhanced on ARM platforms.
- The YEAR2038 macro is used during the build for the 64-bit type time_t.
- The winewayland.drv driver has improved cursor handling.
- Bug reports related to games have been closed: Elite Dangerous, Epic Games Launcher 15.21.0, LANCommander, Kodu.
- Bug reports related to applications have been closed: Quick3270 5.21, digikam, Dolphin Emulator, Windows Sysinternals Process Explorer 17.05, Microsoft Webview 2 installer.
Additionally, the release of the Android application Winlator 5.0 has been published, providing a wrapper over Wine and emulators Box86/Box64 for running Windows applications on Android platform. Winlator deploys Linux environments based on Ubuntu with Mesa3D, DXVK, D8VK, and CNC DDraw, where Windows applications compiled for x86 architecture are run on ARM devices with Android using the emulator and Wine. The new version has improved task manager functionality, increased performance, added support for theme switching, and improved compatibility with XInput.
Notably, a publication in the Linux kernel mailing list regarding the ntsync driver has been made, implementing the character device /dev/ntsync and a set of synchronization primitives used in the Windows NT kernel. Implementing such primitives at the kernel level allows significantly boosting the performance of Windows games launched through Wine. For example, using the ntsync driver compared to the user-space implementation of NT synchronization primitives, the maximum FPS in the game Dirt 3 increased by 678%, in Resident Evil 2 — by 196%, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands — by 177%, Lara Croft: Temple of Osiris — by 131%, Call of Juarez — by 125%, The Crew — by 96%, Forza Horizon 5 — by 48%, and Anger Foot — by 43%.
A significant performance boost is achieved by eliminating the overhead associated with using RPC in user space. Creating a separate driver for the Linux kernel is explained by the challenges in properly implementing NT synchronization API over existing primitives in the kernel; for instance, the NtPulseEvent() operation and the wait-for-all mode in NtWaitForMultipleObjects() require direct queue management. The patches for the ntsync driver are currently in RFC status, meaning they are open for discussion and review by the community but are not yet intended for acceptance into the mainline Linux kernel.
Source: opennet.ru
