Alexandros Frantzis
December 12, 2022
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It's been some time since our last Wayland driver update, and, with the year coming to an end, I wanted to share the exciting progress we made this year.
The focus in 2022 was on maturing the Wayland driver and keeping up to date with the Wine upstream internal changes. This involved, among other things, splitting the driver into a PE and Unix part, updating it for the latest internal driver APIs, and making preparations to support WoW64.
A significant improvement compared to last year is support for cross-process rendering, which is required by Chromium/CEF applications. Last year the driver was able to run Chrome with the "--in-process" command-line option. Chrome is now supported without any special flags, and is fully GPU accelerated on both OpenGL and Vulkan!
This update also brings enhanced support for the linux-dmabuf v4 Wayland protocol (aka dmabuf-feedback), which allows compositors to dynamically send information about optimal formats and modifiers, e.g., depending on the surface presentation mode (fullscreen vs windowed).
This year we made a lot of smaller fixes and enhancements, that in aggregate have greatly improved driver stability. These were a result of both testing we performed ourselves, and also of reports from people trying out the Wayland driver, for which we are very grateful.
All this great work would not have been possible without Leandro and Sergio, who joined the Wine Wayland driver team this year!
We encourage you to visit the discussion in the wine-devel mailing list for more detailed information about this update and future steps.
Below is a video showing the latest version of the Wayland driver for Wine in action, including Chrome with accelerated cross-process rendering, LibreOffice, Call of Duty 2 (Demo), Crayon Physics Deluxe, Dagon, Factorio, The Last Express and Phoning Home. Enjoy!
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