Wine Patches Revived For 64-bit POWER Support, Hangover To Run Windows Apps On POWER

Going back many months have been work on making Wine work nicely on 64-bit POWER (POWER9) for ultimately being able to handle Windows programs on IBM POWER/OpenPOWER hardware. The latest Wine work has now been sent out for benefiting this CPU architecture popular with free software purists.

André Hentschel has sent out his latest 22 patches for porting Wine to PPC64 (64-bit POWER). This comes from cleaning, re-basing, and splitting up earlier POWER patches sent last year.

While Wine itself doesn't handle architecture emulation for running Windows x86/x86_64 programs on other architectures, part of the emphasis of this work is for Hangover to run Windows x86 programs on other architectures. The latest hangover code is suited primarily for x86_64 Windows programs to run on AArch64 but work is being done to extend that to include PowerPC64 as well. Hangover will become more important in the months ahead as well with Apple moving macOS to their ARM64 in-house silicon.

Besides Hangover, bringing Wine to POWER is also being done for Winelib and possibilities around cross-compiling in turn software for PPC64LE.

The latest Wine POWER 64-bit patches can be found on the Wine mailing list.