Wine Staging 4.10 Adds EXT4 Case Insensitive Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine Staging 4.10 Adds EXT4 Case Insensitive Support

Following Monday's release of Wine 4.10, Wine-Staging 4.10 is now available as the latest work on this bleeding-edge / testing version of Wine for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-Staging-4.10-Released

[chriswyatt]

Potentially different behaviour, depending on the file system you use. That could be fun to debug. This reliance on specific file system features doesn't sound great to me, unless it falls back on to some other mechanism that achieves the same thing? More of an optimisation than a feature maybe?

[skeevy420]

Potentially different behaviour, depending on the file system you use. That could be fun to debug. This reliance on specific file system features doesn't sound great to me, unless it falls back on to some other mechanism that achieves the same thing? More of an optimisation than a feature maybe?

According to the article, Wine has an internal method for doing it already.

I just wonder if there will be a way to tell Wine we're using a case-insensitive file system so I can move my Wine drives to a case insensitive zpool and reap the same benefits. Unfortunately, I've moved on from EXT4 in lieu of ZFS, BTRFS, XFS, & BCACHEFS.

EDIT:
I hope it fixes the right joystick of my PS4 controller. Somewhere in the 4.9 series my right joystick started acting funny and will just keep on turning left even if I'm not pushing the stick over. Made the Elusive Contract "fun" yesterday, but I still managed to get my first SA Elusive Target...I've only had 2 Elusive Targets total...sucks buying Hitman 2 so late in so I hope IOI re-releases the Elusive Contracts at some point in time.

[schmidtbag]

If there's a performance increase, I may consider enabling case sensitivity on my drive dedicated to storing games. There's even some native Linux games that occasionally get issues due to case sensitivity (usually due to user-created content) so that would fix that problem too. Nothing but games are stored on the drive so I'm sure I won't see any further negative side effects.

Anyone know if I can just simply add a mount flag in fstab to enable case insensitivity?

[chriswyatt]

If there's a performance increase, I may consider enabling case sensitivity on my drive dedicated to storing games. There's even some native Linux games that occasionally get issues due to case sensitivity (usually due to user-created content) so that would fix that problem too. Nothing but games are stored on the drive so I'm sure I won't see any further negative side effects.

Anyone know if I can just simply add a mount flag in fstab to enable case insensitivity?

It's set on a per-directory basiṣ

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/chattr.1.html

Presumably you could set that on the root inode, but it would have to be empty.

[Grogan]

Good to hear, game files are the one reason I might want this on a directory. (as said, not just wine but content for multi platform games in general... windows users generally aren't aware of filesystem case issues)

Not keen on changing Linux filesystem fundamentals to make this happen, but oh well. At least there are valid reasons for wanting it.

[Remdul]

Ah! I actually have a use case where cases insensitivity fixes critical issues. One of the few closed source software packages I use (Corel PhotoPaint) has a bug, where it converts the first character of a filename to uppercase (obviously questionable) when files opened via command line argument or drag-and-drop (i.e. almost always). The software then crashes or fails to open the file because the file does not appear to exist on the Linux file system (due to filename case mismatch). The work around is to manually rename the file to have a first uppercase character. Anyway, this totally ruins workflow and productivity. But this is the sort of bugs that never gets triggered on Windows, is strictly speaking not even a bug on Windows, but can critically break software on Wine and render it useless.

FYI, Wine does not emulate or abstract the file system in any way. I.e. when a Windows executable on Wine calls fopen(), it maps directly to fopen() as it would if called by a native Linux application. So the only way to fix case sensitivity issues, is directly through at OS file system level. Which is also the proper way (less side effects/bugs due to workarounds). Since you need a Wine prefix anyway, it makes sense to mark that folder (or partition) as case-insensitive through the file system configuration. It is the most elegant solution, and this was well researched by the Wine devs (when I looked into the issue).

Also there have been several Linux file systems (I forget which exactly) which have long supported case-insensitivity, so related infrastructure is already in place. I wouldn't worry about it.

[Royi]

How good is the support for Photoshop CC 2019?

[ryao]

Ah! I actually have a use case where cases insensitivity fixes critical issues. One of the few closed source software packages I use (Corel PhotoPaint) has a bug, where it converts the first character of a filename to uppercase (obviously questionable) when files opened via command line argument or drag-and-drop (i.e. almost always). The software then crashes or fails to open the file because the file does not appear to exist on the Linux file system (due to filename case mismatch). The work around is to manually rename the file to have a first uppercase character. Anyway, this totally ruins workflow and productivity. But this is the sort of bugs that never gets triggered on Windows, is strictly speaking not even a bug on Windows, but can critically break software on Wine and render it useless.

FYI, Wine does not emulate or abstract the file system in any way. I.e. when a Windows executable on Wine calls fopen(), it maps directly to fopen() as it would if called by a native Linux application. So the only way to fix case sensitivity issues, is directly through at OS file system level. Which is also the proper way (less side effects/bugs due to workarounds). Since you need a Wine prefix anyway, it makes sense to mark that folder (or partition) as case-insensitive through the file system configuration. It is the most elegant solution, and this was well researched by the Wine devs (when I looked into the issue).

Also there have been several Linux file systems (I forget which exactly) which have long supported case-insensitivity, so related infrastructure is already in place. I wouldn't worry about it.

ZFS supports it as an optional feature