Wine Staging Update Has Better CUDA Support, Driver Testing Framework

Following the release of Wine 1.7.35 on Friday, the Wine-Staging team released their spin of v1.7.35 that includes several extra features.

Wine-Staging is the initiative to serve as a staging area for new Wine code not yet ready for proper mainline acceptance, inspired in part by the Linux kernel's staging area. Wine-Staging has already landed the Direct3D CSMT patches for improving performance along with NVIDIA CUDA and GPU PhysX support, among other experimental functionality.

With this weekend's Wine-Staging 1.7.35 release, there's improvements to the Wine CUDA support, fixes for broken raw input in various games, and a new driver testing framework.

The Wine Staging team describes the new Driver Testing Framework as, "Most hardware related device drivers do not work in Wine by design, because Wine executes them only with user mode permissions and they can't directly access the hardware. Nevertheless, there are also some drivers which work perfectly fine without communicating to hardware, for example anti cheat software or copy protection drivers. In order to improve the support for such drivers, we implemented a testing framework, which allows to write kernel driver tests. ReactOS already provides a similar testing framework since some time, but so far Wine developers didn't have any suitable solution yet. Hopefully this feature will allow developers to extend the functionality a bit faster in the future, while ensuring that it is still compatible with Windows."

More details on the Wine-Staging 1.7.35 release can be found via Wine-Staging.com. Wine-Staging binaries are available for most Linux distributions.