Wine Wayland Driver Takes Another Step Closer To Mainline

The merge request for landing the first of "many" parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland.

The past few years has seen a lot of work enabling a Wine Wayland driver led by Alexandros Frantzis at Collabora with more functionality working over time. The Wine Wayland driver is hoping to go for mainline Wine this year and the first stepping stone was the merge request opened this morning.

Frantzis commented in the merge request:

"This is the first of (many) parts in the upstreaming of the Wayland driver for Wine. Since the amount of code and commits is large, my approach is to upstream the driver in multiple parts in a serial fashion, with each part being a cohesive (to the degree possible) set of not too many commits. When each part is reviewed and merged, I will move on to proposing the next part. My main goal with this approach is to make reviewing easier and more focused. If you have other ideas about how to improve this process for the reviewers, please let me know.

A lot of pieces need to fall into place before the driver becomes even remotely functional, so, some MRs (especially the initial ones) will be a bit more preparatory in nature."

The first MR introduces the Wayland driver PE and Unixlib components along with some of the basic code.

Alexandros Frantzis has been working on this Wine Wayland driver for a while to avoid Wine having to use XWayland/X11 as is needed currently on Linux.

While it will likely still be a while before this Wayland driver becomes usable for a native Windows applications/games on Wayland experience with the Linux desktop, it's good to see progress being made toward upstreaming.