Wine 1.6: This Year With These Interesting Features

The Phoronix coverage so far from the Wine development track at FOSDEM 2013 includes Gaming On Wine: The Good and Bad Graphics Drivers, Support For Running Windows Apps On ARM With Wine, Wine-Mono Isn't Too Fit For .NET, and Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps. Another worthwhile Wine session was Alexandre Julliard's keynote.

Alexandre Julliard, the founder of the Wine project who is now employed by CodeWeavers to work on upstream Wine (and their CrossOver product), keynoted the Wine session. Julliard talked about the Wine 1.4 release that happened in 2012, the overall (growing) development pace of Wine, and what's ahead for release 1.6.

While some of the features that are baking for Wine 1.6 are already known due to the Wine 1.5 bi-weekly development releases, Alexandre talked about some of the top features to make up the official Wine 1.6 release. His list of top Wine 1.6 features includes support for client-side rendering, layered windows, a native Mac graphics driver, the Wine-Mono support, and raw input support.

The plan is to release Wine 1.6 in 2013 but beyond that there isn't a firm release date at the moment.

Expressed long-term plans for Wine (not for v1.6 in particular) is Direct3D 10/11, USB support, proper Mono integration, and tablets / ARM support. The Mono work is at least coming along and from FOSDEM in Brussels was the primitive Wine ARM demo along with the Android demo.

The DirectX 10 SDK shipped in 2007 and the DirectX 11 SDK has been available in early form (a technical preview) since 2008, but unfortunately the Wine support for these Microsoft standards has lagged behind a great deal. There is some functions implemented and other pieces of Direct3D 10/11 implemented, but nothing for official support nor in a state where any games exclusive to a Direct3D 10/11 renderer would be in a good working state.

In regards to the USB support, there have been some external patches for enabling USB device support within Wine, but nothing that's in a polished and working state for exposing USB devices to Windows applications on Linux and OS X.

The nine slides making up the Wine FOSDEM 2013 keynote can be found here (PDF).