The Big Highlights Of Wine 5.0 From FAudio Integration To Vulkan 1.1 + A Ton Of Bug Fixes

Written by Michael Larabel in WINE on 12 January 2020 at 12:48 PM EST. 30 Comments
WINE
Wine 5.0 is still going through weekly release candidates but the stable release of Wine 5 is expected to land in the back-half of January. With that imminent release, here is a look at the big changes to find with this annual Wine update.

Wine 5.0 represents the latest annual stable update to the Wine code-base and the culmination of the bi-weekly Wine 4.x development snapshots over the past eleven months. Some of the highlights for Wine 5.0 include:

- FAudio integration as a better XAudio2 implementation and done in part thanks to CodeWeavers / Valve as part of Proton efforts.

- Vulkan 1.1 support.

- Support for installing plug-and-play drivers.

- Many DLLs now built as PE files by default.

- DXTn compressed textures / S3 Texture Compression support by default now that patents around that compressed texture format have expired.

- NT kernel spin-locks support.

- Futex-based implementations of more synchronization primitives.

- Various DirectWrite improvements.

- Support for ECC cryptographic keys.

- Greater support for the Windows Media Foundation APIs.

- Support for a shared Wine-Mono to save space rather than needing this open-source .NET implementation per Wine prefix.

- Unicode 12.0 and 12.1 support.

- Better enumeration of display outputs, particularly for multi-monitor Linux setups around Xinerama.

- Initial HTTP Service implementation (HTTP.sys) as the replacement to the Winsock API usage by IIS for better performance than the Windows Sockets API.

- Better compatibility with Windows debuggers.

- Better LLVM MinGW support and separately WineGCC cross-compilation improvements.

More details on Wine 5.0 with its release coming up shortly!
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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