Hangover 9.9 Adds Support For Using The NTSYNC Driver

André Zwing continues hacking on the Hangover project as a means of running Windows applications on AArch64 Linux by leveraging Wine and pairing it with emulators like QEMU, FEX, or Box64. Besides the initial AArch64/ARM64 focus, Hangover can be important for bring Windows game/application on Linux support eventually to other architectures like POWER and RISC-V.

Hangover 9.9 was released on Monday as the newest version of this open-source code that has rebased against upstream Wine 9.9.

In addition to basing off Wine 9.9, Hangover 9.9 has also updated its FEX emulator integration to the latest FEX 2405 release. FEX 2405 brings a number of performance improvements, gets closer to being able to run the Far Cry game, OpenGL and Vulkan thunking without forwarding X11, and other improvements for handling x86/x86_64 binaries on ARM64.

The other notable change with Hangover 9.9 is pulling in support for using the NTSYNC Linux driver. The NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives can lead to much faster performance for Windows games running on Wine. Hangover 9.9 carries the necessary support for being able to use the NTSYNC driver, but that's not all upstream yet in the kernel. Linux 6.10 is adding the basic NTSYNC driver but further functionality remains and thus the NTSYNC driver is treated as "broken" for now but will hopefully be ready in ~v6.11. Whatever the case, once the kernel side is ready to go the Hangover code in user-space is prepared to make use of it or if you are patching your own kernel with out-of-tree patches.

The Hangover project is becoming increasingly practical thanks to more powerful AArch64 single board computers coming to market, existing laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, Asahi Linux with Apple Silicon devices, and upcoming Snapdragon X Elite powered laptops.

Hangover 9.9 source code along with Debian/Ubuntu AArch64 binaries can be downloaded from GitHub.