Wine

Wine is an open-source compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Unix-based operating systems, such as Linux and macOS. It allows users to run Windows software without the need for a Windows operating system.

Wine stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" because it does not emulate a full Windows environment, but rather translates Windows system calls into their equivalents on the host system. This allows Windows applications to run more efficiently and with better performance than if they were emulated.

Features

Binary Compatibility

• Loads 64-bit, 32-bit, 16-bit Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/10 and Windows 3.x programs and libraries
• Win32 compatible memory layout, exception handling, threads and processes
• Designed for POSIX compatible operatings systems (eg. Linux, macOS and FreeBSD) and Android
• "bug-for-bug" compatibility with Windows

Win32 API support

• Support for DirectX based games and applications (Direct3D support up to DirectX 12)
• Support for OpenGL and Vulkan based games and applications
• DirectShow support with use of GStreamer for codecs
• Direct2D, DirectWrite support
• MMDevice API, XAudio, WinMM, DirectSound audio APIs are supported
• Printing via PostScript driver to the host printing system (usually CUPS)
• Enhanced Metafile (EMF) and Windows Metafile (WMF) driver
• Desktop-in-a-box or mixable windows

Allows Windows program to interface with:

• X11-based graphics which allow remote display to any X terminal
• macOS and Android based graphics
• X11, TrueType (.ttf/.ttc) and Windows Bitmap (.fon) fonts
• Sound devices via ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio, Core Audio, etc.
• Multi-lingual keyboards and CJK input method support via XIM
• Modems, serial devices
• Networks (TCP/IP and IPX)
• ASPI Scanners
• Windows Tablets via XInput (eg. Wacom)
• Video capture devices via v4l2
• HID devices via IOHid (MacOS), evdev (Linux), hidraw (Linux), SDL2

API Coverage and Portability

• Designed for source and binary compatibility with Win32 code
• Win32 API test suite to ensure compatibility
• Compilable on a wide range of C compilers
• Permits mixing of Win32 and POSIX code
• Permits mixing of ELF (.so) and PE (.dll/.exe) binaries in one address space
• Win32 compatible header files
• Automatically generated API documentation
• Resource compiler
• Message compiler
• IDL compiler
• Extensive Unicode support
• Internationalization – Wine supports 16 languages
• Built-in debugger and configurable trace messages
• External memory checker support using Valgrind
• Sample programs

What's New

The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 10.0 is now available.

This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed below. The main highlights are the new ARM64EC architecture and the high-DPI scaling support.

ARM64

• The ARM64EC architecture is fully supported, with feature parity with the ARM64 support.
• Hybrid ARM64X modules are fully supported. This allows mixing ARM64EC and plain ARM64 code into a single binary. All of Wine can be built as ARM64X by passing the --enable-archs=arm64ec,aarch64 option to configure. This still requires an experimental LLVM toolchain, but it is expected that the upcoming LLVM 20 release will be able to build ARM64X Wine out of the box.
• The 64-bit x86 emulation interface is implemented. This takes advantage of the ARM64EC support to run all of the Wine code as native, with only the application's x86-64 code requiring emulation.
• No emulation library is provided with Wine at this point, but an external library that exports the emulation interface can be used, by specifying its name in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Wow64\amd64 registry key. The FEX emulator implements this interface when built as ARM64EC.
• It should be noted that ARM64 support requires the system page size to be 4K, since that is what the Windows ABI specifies. Running on kernels with 16K or 64K pages is not supported at this point.

Graphics

• High-DPI support is implemented more accurately, and non-DPI aware windows are scaled automatically, instead of exposing high-DPI sizes to applications that don't expect it.
• Compatibility flags are implemented to override high-DPI support, either per-application or globally in the prefix.
• Vulkan child window rendering is supported with the X11 backend, for applications that need 3D rendering on child windows. This was supported with OpenGL already, and the Vulkan support is now on par.
• The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.4.303 of the Vulkan spec. It also supports the Vulkan Video extensions.
• Font linking is supported in GdiPlus.

Desktop integration

• A new opt-in modesetting emulation mechanism is available. It is very experimental still, but can be used to force display mode changes to be fully emulated, instead of actually changing the display settings.
• The windows are being padded and scaled if necessary to fit in the physical display, as if the monitor resolution were changed, but no actual modesetting is requested, improving user experience.
• A new Desktop Control Panel applet desk.cpl is provided, to inspect and modify the display configuration. It can be used as well to change the virtual desktop resolution, or to control the new emulated display settings.
• Display settings are restored to the default if a process crashes without restoring them properly.
• System tray icons can be completely disabled by setting NoTrayItemsDisplay=1 in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer key.
• Shell launchers can be disabled in desktop mode by setting NoDesktop=1 in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer key.

Direct3D

• The GL renderer now requires GLSL 1.20, EXT_framebuffer_object, and ARB_texture_non_power_of_two. The legacy ARB shader backend is no longer available, and the OffscreenRenderingMode setting has been removed.
• Shader stencil export is implemented for the GL and Vulkan renderers.
• A HLSL-based fixed function pipeline for Direct3D 9 and earlier is available, providing support for fixed function emulation for the Vulkan renderer. It can also be used for the GL renderer, by setting the D3D setting ffp_hlsl to a nonzero value using the registry or the WINE_D3D_CONFIG environment variable.
• The Vulkan renderer uses several dynamic state extensions, if available, with the goal of reducing stuttering in games.
• An alternative GLSL shader backend using vkd3d-shader is now available, and can be selected by setting the D3D setting shader_backend to glsl-vkd3d. Current vkd3d-shader GLSL support is incomplete relative to the built-in GLSL shader backend, but is being actively developed.

Direct3D helper libraries

• Initial support for compiling Direct3D effects is implemented using vkd3d-shader.
• D3DX 9 supports many more bump-map and palettized formats.
• D3DX 9 supports saving palettized surfaces to DDS files.
• D3DX 9 supports mipmap generation when loading volume texture files.
• D3DX 9 supports reading 48-bit and 64-bit PNG files.

Wayland driver

• The Wayland graphics driver is enabled by default, but the X11 driver still takes precedence if both are available. To force using the Wayland driver in that case, make sure that the DISPLAY environment variable is unset.
• Popup windows should be positioned correctly in most cases.
• OpenGL is supported.
• Key auto-repeat is implemented.

Multimedia

• A new opt-in FFmpeg-based backend is introduced, as an alternative to the GStreamer backend. It is intended to improve compatibility with Media Foundation pipelines. It is still in experimental stage though, and more work will be needed, especially for D3D-aware playback. It can be enabled by setting the value DisableGstByteStreamHandler=1 in the HKCU\Software\Wine\MediaFoundation registry key.
• Media Foundation multimedia pipelines are more accurately implemented, for the many applications that depend on the individual demuxing and decoding components to be exposed. Topology resolution with demuxer and decoder creation and auto-plugging is improved.
• DirectMusic supports loading MIDI files.

Input / HID devices

• Raw HID devices with multiple top-level collections are correctly parsed, and exposed as individual devices to Windows application.
• Touchscreen input and events are supported with the X11 backend, and basic multi-touch support through the WM_POINTER messages is implemented. Mouse window messages such as WM_LBUTTON*, WM_RBUTTON*, and WM_MOUSEMOVE are also generated from the primary touch events.
• A number of USER32 internal structures are stored in shared memory, to improve performance and reduce Wine server load by avoiding server round-trips.
• An initial version of a Bluetooth driver is implemented, with some basic functionality.
• The Joystick Control Panel applet joy.cpl enables toggling some advanced settings.
• The Dvorak keyboard layout is properly supported.

Internationalization

• Locale data is generated from the Unicode CLDR database version 46. The following additional locales are supported: kaa-UZ, lld-IT, ltg-LV, and mhn-IT.
• Unicode character tables are based on version 16.0.0 of the Unicode Standard.
• The timezone data is based on version 2024a of the IANA timezone database.

Internet and networking

• The JavaScript engine supports a new object binding interface, used by MSHTML to expose its objects in a standard-compliant mode. This eliminates the distinction between JavaScript objects and host objects within the engine, allowing scripts greater flexibility when interacting with MSHTML objects.
• Built-in MSHTML functions are proper JavaScript function objects, and other properties use accessor functions where appropriate.
• MSHTML supports prototype and constructor objects for its built-in objects.
• Function objects in legacy MSHTML mode support the call and apply methods.
• The JavaScript garbage collector operates globally across all script contexts within a thread, improving its accuracy.
• JavaScript ArrayBuffer and DataView objects are supported.

RPC / COM

• RPC/COM calls are fully supported on ARM platforms, including features such as stubless proxies and the typelib marshaler.
• All generated COM proxies use the fully-interpreted marshaling mode on all platforms.

C runtime

• C++ exceptions and Run-Time Type Information (RTTI) are supported on ARM platforms.
• The ANSI functions in the C runtime support the UTF-8 codepage.

Kernel

• Process elevation is implemented, meaning that processes run as a normal user by default but can be elevated to administrator access when required.
• Disk labels are retrieved from DBus when possible instead of accessing the raw device.
• Mailslots are implemented directly in the Wine server instead of using a socketpair, to allow supporting the full Windows semantics.
• Asynchronous waits for serial port events are reimplemented. The previous implementation was broken by the PE separation work in Wine 9.0.
• The full processor XState is supported in thread contexts, enabling support for newer vector extensions like AVX-512.

macOS

• When building with Xcode >= 15.3 on macOS, the preloader is no longer needed.
• Syscall emulation for applications doing direct NT syscalls is supported on macOS Sonoma and later.

Builtin applications

• The input parser of the Command Prompt tool cmd is rewritten, which fixes a number of long-standing issues, particularly with variable expansion, command chaining, and FOR loops.
• The Wine Debugger winedbg uses the Capstone library to enable disassembly on all supported CPU types.
• The File Comparison tool fc supports comparing files with default options.
• The findstr application supports regular expressions and case insensitive search.
• The regsvr32 and rundll32 applications can register ARM64EC modules.
• The sort application is implemented.
• The where application supports searching files with default options.
• The wmic application supports an interactive mode.

Miscellaneous

• The ODBC library supports loading Windows ODBC drivers, in addition to Unix drivers that were already supported through libodbc.so.
• Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP) is supported for RSA encryption.
• Network sessions are supported in DirectPlay.

Read the complete release notes here.