Wine Developer Begins Experimenting With macOS ARM64 Support

Over the months ahead with Apple preparing future desktops/laptops with their in-house Apple silicon built on the ARM 64-bit architecture, Wine developers are beginning to eye how to support these future 64-bit ARM systems with macOS Big Sur.

Wine developer Martin Storsjo has been experimenting with the macOS + ARM64 support and has got the code along far enough that "small test executables" can run on the patched copy of Wine.

While for years Wine has worked on 64-bit ARM support in the context of Windows RT, the possibility of running Wine on Android or ARM-powered Chromebooks, and other use-cases, Wine for macOS on ARM64 comes with its own set of challenges. Apple macOS on ARM64 has a larger page size, macOS is not mapping anything into the lower 4GB of the address space, memory mappings can't be writable and executable at the same time, and other architectural differences.

But for those wanting to run x86_64 Windows games/applications on macOS ARM64, that support still isn't currently in the scope of this work. The current Wine ARM support is outlined via this Wiki page.

These patches start the macOS ARM64 bring-up for Wine and lay the groundwork for future strides in this area.