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Wine on Wayland meets Vulkan, multi-monitor support & more

Alexandros Frantzis avatar

Alexandros Frantzis
June 07, 2021

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For the past few months we have been improving the experimental Wayland driver for Wine, which allows Windows applications to run directly on Wayland compositors. Our goal is to eventually remove the need for XWayland for many use cases, and thus reduce the overall system complexity while eliminating points of potential inefficiency.

We first announced our work on the driver last December, and posted an update earlier this year. We are now happy to announce a second update for this driver, adding several major features which increase its scope and utility. You can read all the details in the new upstream mailing list RFC (Request for Comment) post. Here is a list of the new features:

  • Vulkan support
  • Multi-monitor support
  • HiDPI handling
  • Cursor clipping/relative movement
  • Wayland keymap handling

Vulkan support comes with window management handling (resizing, fullscreen etc), and can be used either directly or to implement Direct3D through either WineD3D or DXVK.

The Wayland driver now exposes multiple monitors to Wine and supports dynamic addition and removal of monitors. It also supports changing the application-perceived resolution of each monitor (through compositor scaling, see previous update) to implement per-monitor mode changes. There is also support for HiDPI/scaled monitors to the degree that this is achievable under the current Wine and Wayland constraints.

Cursor clipping and relative mouse movement is an important feature for first person perspective games, and the driver utilizes heuristics to best map related application requests to the corresponding Wayland functionality.

Finally, the new Wayland keymap handling allows users to transparently use the current keymap of their Wayland session in Wine applications.

Below is a video showcasing the new features. Enjoy!

 

Comments (3)

  1. Jovian D. Ragon:
    Jul 04, 2021 at 12:57 AM

    When I try to compile the wine wayland repo myself, it keeps saying it hasn't found the 32-bit wayland development libraries even though when I checked I definitely do have them.

    Really excited to see this in any case! Once this matures that's gonna be a LOT of applications that don't need xwayland anymore.

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