Wine 9.6 Adds Support For Advanced AVX Features In Register Contexts

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 9.6 Adds Support For Advanced AVX Features In Register Contexts

Wine 9.6 has just been issued as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-9.6-Released

[schmidtbag]

Wait I thought there was a lot of software out there that required AVX to work. So, is this just for the translation layer or was there some other workaround that used other instructions?

[alexboldt]

Just to make sure I understand correctly...
Does this mean that AVX is now emulated even if my old Nehalem doesn't support it? (so can I play Saints Row 3 now?)
Or does it just mean that wine now supports the use of AVX if it is supported by the CPU?

[duby229]

Just to make sure I understand correctly...
Does this mean that AVX is now emulated even if my old Nehalem doesn't support it? (so can I play Saints Row 3 now?)
Or does it just mean that wine now supports the use of AVX if it is supported by the CPU?

My impression was that wine can use more advanced features of AVX in its own processes now. Wine isn't an emulator, it's an actual implementation of windows API's. Windows apps running on wine can use these features regardless of whether wine itself does so or not. But of course you do need a CPU that actually supports these features.

[duby229]

Wait I thought there was a lot of software out there that required AVX to work. So, is this just for the translation layer or was there some other workaround that used other instructions?

I don't think that's what it was saying. Windows apps that could use these features always could so long as the CPU supported them. It was saying that wine itself can now leverage these new AVX features where they deem it appropriate.

[smitty3268]

I'm not sure I understand what the avx related change is, but I think it has to do with using avx in corner cases such as exception handling.

The support for avx512 state in contexts (specifically delivering avx512 state in hardware exception context and restoring that in NtContinue) is required for The Finals on avx512-enabled machines.

[Weasel]

I don't think that's what it was saying. Windows apps that could use these features always could so long as the CPU supported them. It was saying that wine itself can now leverage these new AVX features where they deem it appropriate.

Yeah, this is about register contexts. Windows ntdll Nt* APIs provide ways to save/restore contexts for threads (a context is like the state of a thread at one point), basically low level building blocks for synchronizations and async APIs.

Of course not many apps use them, so most that use AVX* work. But you know, anti-cheat and stuff, the "wonderful" things.

And well yeah, exceptions.

[darinmiller]

Wine-staging is able to launch Battlenet the without special parameters again. Very nice!

[QwertyChouskie]

Wine-staging is able to launch Battlenet the without special parameters again. Very nice!

I was hoping that the same fix would fix either https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56377 or https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56378 but sadly there doesn't seem to be a difference.