Wine-Staging 6.0-RC5 Is Testing A Patch That May Hurt The Performance Of Some Games

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine-Staging 6.0-RC5 Is Testing A Patch That May Hurt The Performance Of Some Games

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC5 test release is an updated Wine-Staging build that adds nearly 800 patches atop the upstream code-base for experimental/testing features...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-Staging-6.0-RC5

[AJSB]

I didn't had the chance to compile yet , so, i have 2 questions:

Any way to compile Wine-Staging WITHOUT that specific Patch ?

What happens usually with games that use futexes with previous versions of wine/Wine-Staging ?

[microcode]

Is there an actual use case where this improves stability or compatibility? This seems like.. a bad idea, the way it is explained here. I will have to take a look at the thread.

[loganj]

So basically the rest of us will be testers for this "patch". was there any software/game that had any improvements from it?

[trilean]

Meanwhile Wine developers believe Windows with their Win32 futexes and the like are built atop an internal, undocumented interface that in turn are likely system calls.

I wish a Wine developer had a dream where the recently leaked Win XP source code appeared to them...

[loganj]

trilean that is useful for reactos too

[vsteel]

So basically the rest of us will be testers for this "patch". was there any software/game that had any improvements from it?

That is the point of wine-staging. If you are concerned about beta software then the staging branch is not for you.

I am sure something had an improvement or was supposed to have an improvement, but it is in staging so it can be tested in a larger arena where these kinds of bugs can be found. Hence the ~800 patches on top of standard wine.

[flashmozzg]

trilean that is useful for reactos too

In fact it's the opposite. IRC, there was a major stall in the development of ReactOS due to WinXP source leaks, since some of devs had access to that source code and they had to reaudit all of their OS code and get rid of chunks that were not straight up reimplementations from API (since looking at the source code and then reimplementing it, even from memory, is problematic copyright-wise).

[Weasel]

Any way to compile Wine-Staging WITHOUT that specific Patch ?

Append the following options when invoking wine-staging's patchinstall.sh: -W ntdll-NtAlertThreadByThreadId

[Weasel]

Is there an actual use case where this improves stability or compatibility? This seems like.. a bad idea, the way it is explained here. I will have to take a look at the thread.

Since nothing was mentioned, I doubt it.

This is just the classic "let's cater to purity instead of practical performance" issue wine development has (or wine-staging), unfortunately. Given it's by Zebediah Figura it's no surprise.

We should petition against this. At the very least, this patch should clearly be made optional via some environment variable or registry setting. Such a performance drop is absolutely massive. Even 1-2% would be terrible, but this is on another level.