The State of Wine For ARM, MIPS, PowerPC

Besides Wine switching to yearly releases and making Wine-Staging official, there were many other interesting sessions at this year's WineConf. One such session was discussing the state of Wine for alternative architectures.

André Hentschel was the Wine developer leading the discussion about Wine for running Windows programs on non-x86 architectures. He shared that the PowerPC 32-bit support is not quite mature and there really aren't known users, but they're keeping it alive for as long as possible. Meanwhile, for MIPS 32-bit and 64-bit support there's been some porting done but it's not upstream as there's been problems with virtual memory.

To no huge surprise, 32-bit ARM is in the best shape outside of x86/x86_64. The Wine ARM 32-bit support works but there's areas for improvement like with floating-point support. For 64-bit ARM, however, there's only Winelib support due to ABI problems and still waiting on changes in the GCC compiler code.

More details on the state of Wine for "other architectures" can be found via these PDF slides.