Wine-Staging 8.11 Brings Performance Improvements, Registering URL Protocol Handlers

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.11, Wine-Staging 8.11 is out this Sunday morning with 502 patches atop the upstream Wine code.

Wine-Staging continues to serve as the testing/experimental version of Wine for developers and enthusiasts alike. With Wine-Staging 8.11 are a few new patches plus updating of some existing patches, like for pulling in the very latest VKD3D code for Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan.

Wine-Staging 8.11 pulls in a fix for this 13 year old bug report / feature request to allow registering URL protocol handlers under Linux. The request back in 2010 was so Windows applications could register URL protocol handlers under Linux that would then launch the respective program under Wine. The 2010 example was for allowing the Spotify software that was Windows-only at the time to allow registering the spotify:// protocol and to then automatically open the Spotify program under Wine.

This merge request opened last month adds support for creating .desktop files for programs that open URIs. That Wine menu builder code has now been pulled into Wine-Staging for addressing the 13 year old request.

Wine-Staging 8.11 also adds this MR for moving the periodic registry save out of the Wine server. In turn this improves performance of registry writes. That merge request explains:

"The problem is that registry save is a very heavy operation (scheduled each 30sec in wineserver) during which server doesn't process any requests and the whole prefix is stalled for the duration of the operation.

For some reference, the process takes from 50-100ms here up to 1-1.5sec with default initial registry (after some registry modifications which trigger actual registry flush), depending on the filesystem type and state (as huge time may be spent in file close / rename). With the same registry after this patchset the server part (flush_key returning the whole registry data) is taking ~4-5mcs, measured from the client side so that already includes data transfer."

Also on the performance front for this bi-weekly Wine-Staging update is improving the GDI+ performance.

Both Wine and Wine-Staging can be downloaded via WineHQ.org.