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

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 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...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/WineConf-2022-Highlights

[doomie]

Wasn't there some talk a while back about effort getting USB peripheral drivers working under wine? I could swear that's what it was... If so, I wonder what happened to that..

[user1]

Is it true that the whole PE conversion badly affects Wine's performance? Or maybe I'm confusing with this claim about the new WOW64 method to run 32 bit apps (which also idk if it's true).

[oiaohm]

Wasn't there some talk a while back about effort getting USB peripheral drivers working under wine? I could swear that's what it was... If so, I wonder what happened to that..

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Wineusb-Merged

You are most likely think about the WineUSB stuff. This is not generic drivers. Applications using windows winusb.sys interface being able to work with wine if you have all the permissions set the right way.

[MastaG]

What about Wayland ?

[Weasel]

Is it true that the whole PE conversion badly affects Wine's performance? Or maybe I'm confusing with this claim about the new WOW64 method to run 32 bit apps (which also idk if it's true).

That's WOW64 method you think of. PE conversion is a hard requirement for it, but it's not the same thing.

PE conversion by itself shouldn't impact performance, just improve compatibility. At least in theory. The problem is that, prior to PE conversion, Wine was using glibc for example, the unix one. Now it is using the one included in Wine's own msvcrt/ucrtbase. Needless to say, Wine's versions of most functions tend to be far less optimized. Various people tried to send optimized versions but ofc it's very hard to get them in past the maintainers unless they have some huge perf gain, sadly. Kinda dumb but it is what it is.

In my opinion if any such function performs worse than glibc and any patch demonstrates any speedup above the current version, it should be instantly accepted as long as it's correct, because this is a fucking regression compared to when it used libc. I don't care if they (the maintainers) think it's not "good enough", it's a fact, and facts are above opinions.

[furtadopires]

What about Wayland ?

Apparently in the same distant future as HDR linux support

[user1]

That's WOW64 method you think of. PE conversion is a hard requirement for it, but it's not the same thing.

PE conversion by itself shouldn't impact performance, just improve compatibility. At least in theory. The problem is that, prior to PE conversion, Wine was using glibc for example, the unix one. Now it is using the one included in Wine's own msvcrt/ucrtbase. Needless to say, Wine's versions of most functions tend to be far less optimized. Various people tried to send optimized versions but ofc it's very hard to get them in past the maintainers unless they have some huge perf gain, sadly. Kinda dumb but it is what it is.

In my opinion if any such function performs worse than glibc and any patch demonstrates any speedup above the current version, it should be instantly accepted as long as it's correct, because this is a fucking regression compared to when it used libc. I don't care if they (the maintainers) think it's not "good enough", it's a fact, and facts are above opinions.

So from what you describe, I understand that 64 bit apps also suffer from the performance hit because the PE converted modules don't use the better optimized glibc anymore? (I'm not super familiar with Wine's architecture).
Also, are there any numbers/benchmarks that show how much percent of performance is lost?

[RejectModernity]

What about Wayland ?

And what about Pipewire driver?

[Weasel]

So from what you describe, I understand that 64 bit apps also suffer from the performance hit because the PE converted modules don't use the better optimized glibc anymore? (I'm not super familiar with Wine's architecture).
Also, are there any numbers/benchmarks that show how much percent of performance is lost?

Yeah of course, PE is basically the .dll format used by Windows. On Windows, all such modules are .dll obviously, so this conversion actually keeps compatibility with Windows for the most part. Important for DRM checks, anti cheats and other low level stuff.

What I described is just a side effect. I'm not saying they have to go back to using fake dll with unix modules. But rather that they really ought to take optimizations more seriously, for libc stuff, so their implementation is on par with glibc.