Wine Is Now In Better Shape On NetBSD Thanks To GSoC 2019

In addition to NetBSD seeing better DRM ioctl support for its Linux compatibility layer (as part of an effort towards possible Steam support) thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, there were also Wine improvements as a result of this Google programming initiative.

Student developer Naveen Narayanan worked the summer on improving NetBSD's Wine support, particularly when it comes to AMD64 (x86_64) support.

Now with GSoC 2019 having concluded, Wine 4.4 and Wine 4.13 are both working on NetBSD AMD64/i386 compared to the classic Wine support previously available. All of the original goals for this GSoC 2019 project were met and the student developer will continue maintaining NetBSD's wine64/wine32/wine64-dev packages moving forward.

One limitation though of NetBSD's current support for running Windows programs on this BSD operating system is the default kernel not enabling USER_LDT. Without USER_LDT support in the NetBSD kernel, there isn't the ability to run 32-bit games/applications on Wine AMD64 builds.

More details on the improved Wine port for NetBSD via the NetBSD.org blog.