Wine Developer Begins Experimenting With macOS ARM64 Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine Developer Begins Experimenting With macOS ARM64 Support

Over the months ahead with Apple preparing future desktops/laptops with their in-house Apple silicon built on the ARM 64-bit architecture, Wine developers are beginning to eye how to support these future 64-bit ARM systems with macOS Big Sur...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-ARM64-macOS-Initial-Patch

[skeevy420]

**Reads Article**

Nice. Really Nice. Huh, didn't know about the 4GB and other memory limits; sounds interesting.

But for those wanting to run x86_64 Windows games/applications on macOS ARM64, that support still isn't currently in the scope of this work.

Picard WTF is this shit.jpeg

[V1tol]

I wonder if Wine can work using Rosetta. This can help at least for a while until full support is ready.

[kpedersen]

I wonder if Wine can work using Rosetta. This can help at least for a while until full support is ready.

Gosh, it feels so weird talking about Rosetta again since 2006. Why are we still fiddling with the same old ancient problems after all this time? XD
From history we know that Rosetta will be around for ~2 years before Apple kills it like they did with PowerPC "version" so is certainly not a long term solution.

I would really love to see some qemu-user emulation bolted onto Wine. That would be handy for Raspberry Pi and Android builds of Wine too! I think this is kinda similar to what Exagear Desktop did for the Raspberry Pi before they took their toys to the grave with them.

We will finally ween ourselves away from x86* one day and having a Wine that can also translate classic x86 win32 binaries would be a good first step. User emulation is much faster than people think because it doesn't need to emulate the entire machine or kernel (just the binary).

[Alexmitter]

Any work on OSX support is a waste of time for Wine. Soon no OpenGL, No Vulkan. Actually no modern Grapics API that could do the job at all.
So Wine is basically stuck to the same functionality it had many years ago, just made running on that horrible platform.

But CodeWeavers gets paid for supporting that platform, they have paying customers and use that money to support Wine, so I wont blame them. I can only imagin that it is quite frustrating.

[CommunityMember]

I wonder if Wine can work using Rosetta.

Rosetta 2 is expected to be performant primarily when it can translate existing x86 application code directly to ARM code when an application is installed, rather than running in JIT emulation mode, and will require apps using JIT emulation to jump through some interesting hoops. Oh, and btw, it is intended to be 64-bit only, since Apple forced 64-bit only apps a number of years back. I suspect that means that those hoping to run 32-bit x86 steam games on Apple Silicon are going to be out of luck.

[tildearrow]

memory mappings can't be writable and executable at the same time,

Really?! What will the Dolphin emulator team do now? o-o

Copy JIT code from a write page to an executable one? Come on.... this is slow!

What a big disappointment they did this... They should have allowed pages to be set write/exec at the same time... :l

[wizard69]

Really?! What will the Dolphin emulator team do now? o-o

Copy JIT code from a write page to an executable one? Come on.... this is slow!

What a big disappointment they did this... They should have allowed pages to be set write/exec at the same time... :l

Actually I support Apple here. Doing what you ask isn’t worth the security issues.

[wizard69]

Any work on OSX support is a waste of time for Wine.

I probably is a waste of time but not for the reasons you outline.

Soon no OpenGL, No Vulkan. Actually no modern Grapics API that could do the job at all.
So Wine is basically stuck to the same functionality it had many years ago, just made running on that horrible platform.

First off Mac OS is not horrible, the company is but that is an entirely different issue. As for graphic you apparently have never heard of Metal. From the standpoint of the user Mac OS is measurably better in almost every way compared to the alternative. This includes Linux which I’ve run for years. The only reason I don’t have a Mac right now is the other horrible experiences with Apple.

But CodeWeavers gets paid for supporting that platform, they have paying customers and use that money to support Wine, so I wont blame them. I can only imagin that it is quite frustrating.

It should be frustrating as they are writing for an entirely different OS on a completely different instruction set. Honestly though supporting old software on modern Windows is no longer a Cake walk. Go At some point in the life of any platform you need to cutoff the support of the past to move forward. This is a good thing.

[kpedersen]

you need to cutoff the support of the past to move forward. This is a good thing.

Apple keeps cutting off functionality but in what way are the users "moving forward"? This whole Rosetta 2 thing is such a blast to the past Apple stepped back in time well over 10 years. Add that to your idea of a "central vendor" and you guys are so retro its like being in the 80s.

Any work on OSX support is a waste of time for Wine. Soon no OpenGL, No Vulkan. Actually no modern Grapics API that could do the job at all.

Arguably this is why Wine could be so useful. Soon running software in the Wine compat layer is the only way developers will be arsed to port their software to macOS. Its not like anyone can be bothered to pick up a Swift compiler and a "Metal" tutorial for such a tiny number of non-technical users.