The development team behind Wine the free and open-source compatibility layer, created to enable Microsoft Windows applications and software to run on Unix-like operating systems, has this week announced the availability of Wine 5.0. This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes together with a large number of improvements.
Main features included in Wine 5.0 take the form of Builtin modules in PE format, Multi-monitor support, XAudio2 re-implementation and Vulkan 1.1 support. A contents list of what is new within the latest Wine 5.0 application as listed below. For a complete list jump over to the official Wine HQ website by following the link below.
Wine 5.0 PE modules
– Most modules are built in PE format (Portable Executable, the Windows binary format) instead of ELF when the MinGW compiler is available. This helps various copy protection schemes that check that the on-disk and in-memory contents of system modules are identical.
– The actual PE binaries are copied into the Wine prefix instead of the fake DLL files. This makes the prefix look more like a real Windows installation, at the cost of some extra disk space.
– Modules that have been converted to PE can use standard wide-char C functions, as well as wide-char character constants like L”abc”. This makes the code easier to read.
– Not all modules have been converted to PE yet; this is an ongoing process that will continue during the Wine 5.x development series.
– The Wine C runtime is updated to support linking to MinGW-compiled binaries; it is used by default instead of the MinGW runtime when building DLLs.
Wine 5.0 Graphics
– Multiple display adapters and monitors are properly supported, including dynamic configuration changes.
– The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec.
– The WindowsCodecs library is able to convert more bitmap formats, including palette-indexed formats.
Wine 5.0 Kernel
– Most of the functions that used to be in Kernel32 are moved to KernelBase, to follow the architecture of recent Windows versions.
– Libraries of the wrong 32/64-bitness are ignored when found in the search path, to enable loading the correct one if it’s found further in the path.
– Kernel objects are better emulated for device drivers that expect to manipulate objects from the kernel side.
– The kernel-level synchronization objects like spin locks, fast mutexes, remove locks, and resource variables are implemented.
– The system battery state is properly reported to applications.
Wine 5.0 User interface
– Minimized windows are displayed using their title bar instead of the old Windows 3.1-style icons.
– The new button styles Split Buttons and Command Links are implemented.
– The Edit control sets margins correctly also for CJK fonts.
Source: Wine : Liliputing
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