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Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

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111–120 of 512 posts

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#111
> This might sound like a small quality-of-life improvement, but it's a massive piece of engineering work. The WoW64 mode now handles OpenGL memory mappings, SCSI pass-through, and even 16-bit application support. Yes, 16-bit! If you've got ancient Windows software from the '90s that you need to run for whatever reason, Wine 11 has you covered.

Does that also apply to macOS? Even on Intel machines, Apple dropped 32-bit support many many years ago and IIRC it took ugly workarounds that weren't ever part of upstream WINE but of Crossover.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if Wine eventually becomes more stable than Windows.

Wine actually does run some ancient Windows games better than Windows 11 itself.

Anything Direct Draw related will be mapped into OpenGL under Unix giving you decent speeds. On Windows it will be a crawling slideshow because from Windows 8 and up it will use a really dog slow software mode with no acceleration at all, worse than plain VESA. Yes, you can reuse WineD3D DLL's on Windows and run these game in a fast way, but not by default, it's a Win32 port of some Wine libraries.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#113
post #3

it seems if you want the same on macOS, this is the place to contribute: https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-ba...

But does anyone care about MacOS? ;) I mean, I know Mac has had some great games (eg. I spent so much time on school Macs playing that Bolo tank game) ... but they have probably <1% of the number of games Windows has. I'd expect a simiilar percentage of devs to be interested in Mace (or whatever you call Mac Wine).

Not sure what you mean. The number of Mac games isn't relevant to a subthread about a project to increase performance when Windows games on Mac.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#115
post #88

Is the difference between the NT-style and POSIX-style semaphores essentially just that NT (and now this new API in Linux) supports setting a max value? Why don't POSIX semaphores support this?

WaitForMultipleObjects is fascinating behind the scenes. A single thread can wait on up to 64 independent events, which is done by plumbing the KTHREAD data structure with literally 64 slots for dispatcher header stuff, plus all the supporting Ke/dispatcher logic in the kernel.

There’s never been a POSIX equivalent to this. It requires sophisticated kernel support and the exact same parity can’t be achieved in user space alone.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#117
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who keep parroting this clearly have no experience of gaming on linux.

Are you able to run any of the old Loki games on Linux these days?

With compat libraries and OSSPD it will run even under Pulseaudio.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like it won't be long before Microsoft starts helping with that (by making Windows less stable, not improving Wine).

What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that. For simple desktop stuff I don't think they have many options to lock in other developers (and their audiences) to windows unless they want do so themselves (putting aside web based or not PC-desktop). Bleeding edge gaming and multiplayer anti-cheat is one area where I think having a big company owning the OS probably…

> What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that

Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about private customers any more. They don't have money.

What has money though is enterprise/government sales, and MS got these customers tightly locked in. Compliance audits and tooling for insurances or legal stuff (SOX, GDPR, ...) are built against a full Microsoft stack of MS Server, Active Directory, Azure, Teams, Office 365 and Windows desktops.

You might be able to get away with replacing AD and GPO with Samba servers but even that is already a pain when the auditors come knocking. Everything else? There is no single FOSS based "standard offering" (i.e. a combination of everything needed to run an on-prem enterprise site, Office replacement, remote collaboration tooling), so every audit for such setups must be custom made and involves a lot of extra work.

A second leg is industrial control machines, medical devices and the likes. That's all stuff built by third party vendors and integrators. They need to continue on Windows because switching to an alternative OS would require redoing everything from scratch on the software and certification side. These customers buy the LTSC IoT stuff.

And that is why you see Microsoft pushing enshittification so hard on private customers... extract the last few cents you can from them. But the real money comes from the large customers.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#119
post #16

Wine is a project that I've grown a near-infinite level of respect for. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a lot of the work for Wine is boring and thankless. Digging through and trying to get exact parity with both the documented and undocumented behavior of Windows for the past 30 years doesn't sound fun, but it's finding every little weird edge case that makes Wine a viable product. The fact that Wine runs…

It is a superb project, and a hard thing to do.

It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#120
post #92
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people? What mainstream Linux distros ship without fsync or esync support?

I would assume most of them? I'd be surprised if distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. would ship non-mainline kernel features like that. Sure, gaming-focused distros, or distros like Arch or Gentoo might (optionally or otherwise), but mainstream ? Probably not. Of course, esync doesn't require kernel patches, so I imagine that was more broadly out there. But it sounds like fsync got you performance pretty close…

esync and fsync both use mainline kernel features.
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