Wine's Wayland Driver Is Becoming Mature, May Aim For Upstreaming Early Next Year

While now in the code freeze for Wine 8.0 as the next annual stable release of Wine for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, one of the features that didn't make it is the long in-development Wayland driver. Thankfully though the Wayland driver continues to mature and it looks like early next year following Wine 8.0 it might finally be upstreamed.

Going back to the end of 2020 was an experimental Wayland driver for Wine. With time the Wine Wayland driver has implemented more functionality and slowly coming to parity with the X11 support for Wine on Linux.

Alexandros Frantzis showing off the progress of the experimental Wine Wayland driver.

Alexandros Frantzis of Collabora shared today the latest Wayland driver update where he notes there has been work on splitting the driver into PE and Unix portions, preparations for WoW64 support, support for cross-process rendering so that it can work with Chromium/CEF software, better support for the DMA-BUF v4 Wayland protocol, many fixes, and various other enhancements.

The Wine Wayland support appears to be in much better shape now as shown by Frantzis' video below.

As for finally getting the Wayland code upstreamed, he commented:

Last year, due to the extensive ongoing internal rework in Wine (e.g., win32u), the decision was made to postpone the upstreaming of the Wayland driver until some amount of internal stability had been reached. My impression is that things are a lot more stable now, from the drivers' point of view at least. Is there any upcoming work that people feel would be severely hindered by the upstreaming of the Wayland driver?

Ideally, I would like to start the upstreaming effort (which I expect will take some time) at some point early next year, after the codebase has been unfrozen. Does this sound reasonable?

So if all goes well potentially early next year in the Wine 8.x bi-weekly development releases we could possibly see it upstreamed. More details on the Wayland Wine status via the wine-devel list.