Wine 1.7.7 Brings Some Small Updates

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 1.7.7 Brings Some Small Updates

The latest bi-weekly Wine development release is available...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTUyMzE

[przemoli]

Command Stream is in?

[kenjitamura]

Command Stream is in?

Good question. Here are some posts I've read on the matter to bring more info to light in case anyone else wants to guess at what's going on.

Here is a quote from WineHQ in a thread about the patches by user "oiaohm":

CSMT does not pass wine own test suite so your mileage will vary badly. CSMT will go up for merging once the issues with the wine test suite are mostly fixed.

This was written on November 1.

However, here is an excerpt from a press release about Crossover games 13 which came out on November 12:

The centerpiece of release 13 is a dramatic improvement in graphics performance, particularly for games
...
The key to CrossOver 13 is a new series of technical enhancements referred to internally as ?The Command Stream.? The Command Stream allows CrossOver?s underlying open-source technology, Wine, to process graphical commands separately from CPU-related commands. ?This means there?s no waiting around for the GPU to finish what it?s doing,? said White. ?Command Stream passes redraws to the GPU just the way it likes it?hard and fast. And everybody gets instant gratification as a result.?

So crossover games for sure has it implemented but you'd think if it were functioning in the wine dev releases they'd put something about it in patch notes rather than doing a silent release so I'm inclined to think it's not present yet in the dev wine releases.

Here's a much earlier post from Stefan D?singer dated August 6th on a wineHQ bug report that would benefit from a command stream:

If you want to support our work on Wine, you can buy a copy of
CrossOver. Our work goes back to upstream Wine. (Except of course for dirty
hacks Wine won't accept anyway.)

So my best guess right now is that Crossover Games has it implemented in a way that would be considered a "dirty hack" for the wine developers and so it'll take a bit longer to land in pure wine devel release. The alternative theory would be that Crossover games developers are withholding the patch for a bit longer to keep their Crossover client a bit ahead of the curb and attract some more subscriptions before submitting them into wine, but I really doubt that to be the case.

[pinguinpc]

In this wine version works AoE II HD (no more black textures)

[ninez]

Command Stream is in?

It's funny, on every Wine release, there is always a person or two thinking these patches might be in, unfortunately, these patches are fairly invasive (and don't apply cleanly over Wine 1.7.2+) and the test suite code will probably take a while to get going. (on Wine-patches list, some tests have landed, but i am sure there is still a lot of work to be done)...

So my best guess right now is that Crossover Games has it implemented in a way that would be considered a "dirty hack" for the wine developers and so it'll take a bit longer to land in pure wine devel release. The alternative theory would be that Crossover games developers are withholding the patch for a bit longer to keep their Crossover client a bit ahead of the curb and attract some more subscriptions before submitting them into wine, but I really doubt that to be the case.

It looks like crossover has taken the original CSMT patches from september (Wine 1.7.1) and reworked them to apply to Wine 1.7.4 (which is Crossover 13's 'base' of Wine). The original CSMT patches can be found here; https://github.com/PlayOnLinux/wine-...er/custom/CSMT ... if you look, it's a pretty big patchset (100+ patches)...

I did a quick diff on CrossOver13, just to take a look at their modifications (since 12.5 - as i've already pulled any and all patches that i was interested in, from that release of crossover). the CSMT code wouldn't be all that hard to pull from Crossover13 source code (although it's a 35k diff, it's actually less scary than it sounds, since you would only be pulling a portion of it... but the person separating it, would need to look over the original patchset and maybe be slightly familiar with Wine's code. ~ I could probably do it, if i felt motivated, but i'm not a transgamer and generally don't spend hours doing things on my computer that i am not going to be making use of

[ninez]

...BUt the MacOSX wine-rt type code looks interesting. (implemented for FL Studio MacOSX/Wine port, I am sure).

[AJSB]

Since several WINE devs gone to Codeweavers that WINE updates are less than stellar....only small updates, no more big updates....and many only related to OS X...

[Krejzi]

In this wine version works AoE II HD (no more black textures)

Finally!

[ninez]

Since several WINE devs gone to Codeweavers that WINE updates are less than stellar....only small updates, no more big updates....and many only related to OS X...

That is plain FUD. Wine Development is *driven By CodeWeavers* and has been for *years and years*. To be saying/acting like 'all of a sudden' CodeWeavers is snatching up developers && hurting Wine as a Project is, well, uninformed at the very least and simply not accurate. Part of the Reason, as of late, that you are seeing so much OSX work being done is in part because CodeWeavers (who hires/pays many wine developers) has been hired to port FL Studio to MacOSX. <this is no different than back in the day, when Code Weavers and Google were focused on certain areas of Wine's code that Allowed Adobe Products (like photoshop) to work under Wine.

Big updates happen in Wine when they the code has tests in place and has went through the rigorous submission/review process. The CSMT patches (d3d command stream), will most likely land in Wine in the not so distant future. Same goes for the Netflix code (which has already been quickly && partially merged into Upstream Wine).