WineConf 2022 Talked Up Vulkan, PE Conversion Progress, Wine 8.0 Early Next Year

Taking place this week alongside the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC 2022) was WineConf as the annual gathering of Wine developers. CodeWeavers organized the co-hosted events in Minneapolis and during WineConf were two days of interesting talks for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux and macOS.

As summed up during the WineConf 2022 keynote: Wine has seen a lot of work on the Portable Executable "PE" conversion front, the Wine D3D Vulkan back-end, multi-monitor support, improved theming, Xaudio based on FAudio, and much more. The PE conversion effort will prove useful for supporting 32-bit Windows software on 64-bit, x86 on ARM, copy protection, and other advantages. On the infrastructure side, their migration to a GitLab-based workflow is proving successful.

The WineD3D Vulkan back-end is continuing to mature and besides a few edge cases is generally offering better performance than the Direct3D OpenGL code path.

As usual, Wine 8.0 is being planned for release in early 2023. As such, in early December will mark the Wine 8.0 code freeze and the beginning of release candidates. In time for Wine 8.0 the plan is to have VKD3D 1.6 merged.

On the Wine-Staging front there are around 600 patches still outstanding and the developers could use more help improving and working to get those patches upstreamed. Unfortunately, Wine-Staging is rarely used by developers as a testing ground for major new code.

The WineConf talks can be found alongside the X.Org tracks via the schedule. Below are the recordings for the two days of WineConf 2022.