Wine Patches Cleaned Up, Out For Review On Very Early POWER 64-Bit Support

With the Raptor Blackbird popular among open-source enthusiasts for a libre 64-bit Linux desktop compute and that getting more POWER9 hardware out in the wild, more users are interested in seeing Wine work for 64-bit POWER hardware. Last year was some early porting work done by Raptor Computing Systems but now a cleaned up patch series has been sent out with this very primitive PPC64 work.

Besides these patches out for review being very primitive and far from a complete POWER Wine port, it does lay the foundation for more work to happen. But it's also important to note the focus here is on Winelib support for POWER due to Wine itself not handling CPU emulation for say directly running x86_64 Windows binaries from a shiny POWER9 Blackbird desktop.

As outlined on the Raptor Wiki, their motivation is on seeing Winelib support working on POWER9 for being able to build open-source projects targeting Windows and able to rely upon Winelib. "Enabling wine on ppc64 gets us a cheap way to allow these projects to run (when built from source) on ppc64 systems via winelib."

The POWER Wine branch hasn't been updated since last year while now André Hentschel sent out a set of the cleaned up patches adding the initial pieces for PPC64. (No link to the mailing list as the Wine mailing list still appears stuck in a protected mode in recent days for accessing the web archives.)

We'll see where these latest Wine PPC64 patches lead and what else we might see on this front in the weeks/months ahead. Seeing André Hentschel taking up interest is a good sign with him having also been involved in Wine's bring-up for 64-bit ARM.