Wine PPC64 Revived Again For Running Windows Programs On POWER CPUs

Two years ago patches were posted in working on Wine support for IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware. The aim with that enablement has been to run Windows programs on POWER 64-bit hardware via Wine with the related "Hangover" project for handling the cross-architecture difference. The Wine patches for PPC64 have now been revived with hopes of mainlining them now that Wine 6.0 has passed.

André Hentschel has taken over the work for cleaning up and re-basing the prior POWER 64-bit little endian patches for Wine. He feels the patches have matured sufficiently that they could be mainlined now, especially with Wine 6.0 stable having been recently released and thus a year for new work to bake until the Wine 7.0 stable milestone.

The focus on the POWER support for Wine remains with Winelib and getting it working nicely with Hangover in order to run conventional Windows x86/x64 programs on modern IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware. Via Winelib is also an effort to potentially allow some open-source Windows programs to be cross-compiled for PPC64LE.

The updated Wine port can be found on the developer list while awaiting review to see if the code is in good enough shape that it could potentially be mainlined this year.