Wine Begins Landing PPC64 Code To Eventually Help With Windows Programs On POWER

Going back about two years there has been work on properly supporting Wine on POWER 64-bit (PPC64). Now past the Wine 6.0 stable release, it looks like that work that work is finally beginning to land. In conjunction with Hangover to handle the cross-architecture aspect, the hope is to eventually allow Windows x86 programs to work on libre POWER systems or at the very least with native Winelib support to help in porting open-source Windows software to IBM POWER / OpenPOWER.

Last week the Wine PPC64 patches were revised again with the ambitions of seeing good Wine support on POWER for the mentioned reasons of using the "Hangover" project to allow Windows x86 programs to run on other architectures like POWER or separately to at least have Winelib running nicely to help in porting software to build on this alternative CPU architecture.

Last week's patch series consisted of 23 patches and a lot of work. Not all of that code has been merged yet but with a Git push today some of the initial PPC64 patches have appeared in Wine Git ahead of the Wine 6.2 milestone on Friday.

Raptor's Blackbird remains one of the best fully-libre/open-source systems at the moment with a fair amount of performance - soon it might even work well with Wine.

The PPC64 code so far includes PPC64 support in the WRC and WIDL components and some basic PPC64 handling bits. Nothing major yet but with these first PPC64 patches having hit the Git tree, hopefully it won't be long before the rest is in place for those hoping to leverage Wine on POWER9 systems popular with Linux users -- namely the Blackbird and Talos hardware from Raptor.