Wine 8.3 Released With Low Fragmentation Heap, Smart Card Support

Wine 8.3 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

The highlights for Wine 8.3 consist of:

- Support for the Low Fragmentation Heap.
- Smard card support using PCSC-Lite.
- Bundled Zydis library for more correct disassembly.
- Various bug fixes.

The low-fragmentation heap front-end in NTDLL is for reducing fragmentation by carving out smaller blocks from the larger allocated blocks. This low-fragmentation heap support was started a few months back but failed to make it for Wine 8.0 due to various issues and only now part of the release.

The initial Smart Card support using PCSC-Lite is also notable. This ultimately is working toward addressing several long-standing bugs in Wine around Smart Card support and application errors that will hopefully be addressed in the near future.

Wine 8.3 also has 29 known bug fixes affecting various games and applications. The full list of Wine 8.3 changes can be found on WineHQ.org along with the various downloads.