Hangover Project Restarted To Run Windows 32-bit/64-bit Apps On ARM64/PPC64 & More

Several years ago the open-source "Hangover" project started as allowing Windows x86_64 and x86 programs to run on 64-bit ARM Linux by leveraging the upstream Wine software as well as QEMU. Hangover also saw work for allowing Windows programs to run on POWER9 Linux hardware and other architectures. The Hangover project has been on hiatus but is now back to being revived.

Hangover has been quite promising for running Windows apps/games on 64-bit Arm and other CPU architectures but was held up on waiting for the WoW64 work to settle. The WoW64 work has been about allowing 32-bit Portable Executable (PE) modules to call 64-bit Unix libraries. In turn this allows for 32-bit Windows applications to run without requiring 32-bit Unix libraries. With the recent Wine 8.0 stable release following all of the Wine 7.x bi-weekly development releases the past year, the WoW64 work is in much better standing and that has unblocked more work to happen for Hangover.

Developer André Zwing wrote this weekend on the Wine mailing list:

As you might know, Hangover development stalled years ago waiting for the WoW64 support in Wine to complete. With Wine 8.0 (and even better with Jaceks wow branch) this is now done. In October I started to connect Qemu to that WoW64 support in my spare time and it progressed until I finally was able to publish some of that work today. It's still missing instructions and even some patches, but it should give a good introduction on what this will look like. In fact I started to get wowarmhw running, so I could do the first steps on a x86-64 machine to run ARM32 binaries. But exactly this part is missing for now as things changed since then.

As of today the Hangover Git repository has moved from "classic" Hangover to the new WoW64-based "Hangover-Next" codebase as it continues to be developed.

With open-source software efforts like Wine+Hangover as well as other emulator efforts like FEX-Emu and Box64, the outlook is quite positive for being able to run Windows x86/x64 games and applications on the growing number of 64-bit Arm laptops and other non-x86 Linux devices.