Wine 8.8 arrives with initial support for ARM64EC, fixes and more

It was already released the new experimental version of the implementation Wine 8.8, which since the release of version 8.7, 18 bug reports have been closed and about 253 changes have been made in preparation for this new release.

For those who do not know about Wine, they should know that this is a popular free and open source software which allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. To be a bit more technical, Wine is a compatibility layer that translates system calls from Windows to Linux and uses some Windows libraries, in the form of .dll files.

Main new features of the development version of Wine 8.8

In this new development version of Wine 8.8 that is presented, one of the main novelties is the Implemented initial support for loading ARM64EC modules (ARM64 Emulation Compatible, used to simplify the migration of applications originally written for the x86_64 architecture to ARM64 systems by providing the ability to run individual x86_64 code modules in an ARM64 environment using an emulator) which is a new ABI (Arm11 Binary Interface) app) that is compatible with Windows XNUMX on ARM.

Taking a piece of text from the Microsoft site:

Arm64EC (“Emulation Compatible”) allows you to create new native applications or incrementally transition existing x64 applications to take advantage of the native speed and performance possible with Arm-powered devices, including better power consumption, battery life and accelerated AI and ML workloads.

Arm64EC is a new Application Binary Interface (ABI) for applications running on Windows 11 Arm devices. It is a Windows 11 feature that requires the use of the Windows 11 SDK and is not available in Windows 10 on Arm.

With this new feature, users can now run Windows apps on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems built for the ARM64EC. This is an important development for Wine, as it expands the range of applications that can run on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

Another of the changes that stands out in this new release is that it has been additional work on the PostScript driver to provide full support for the PE (Portable Executable) executable file format, with which these changes are expected to improve the overall performance of Wine and make it more stable.

Of the other changes highlights of this new release:

• Ongoing code restructuring to support IMEs (input method editors).
• Closed bug reports related to Devil May Cry.
• Fixed Wine compilation warning errors with gcc
• Fix in winedbg loading incorrect debugging symbols for built-in dlls
• Several applications need tasklist.exe to support printing process list in CSV format '/f or CSV /nh' (Net64+ Client 2.x, Playstation Now 11.x, MathType)

If you want to know more about this new development version of Wine released, you can check the registry of changes in the following link. 

How to install the development version of Wine 8.6 on Ubuntu and derivatives?

If you are interested in being able to test this new development version of Wine on your distro, you can do so by following the instructions we share below.

The first and most important step will be to enable the 32-bit architecture, that although our system is 64-bit, performing this step saves us many problems that usually occur, since most of the Wine libraries are focused on 32-bit architecture.

For this we write about the terminal:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Now we must import the keys and add them to the system with this command:

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key
sudo apt-key add Release.key

Done this now we are going to add the following repository to the system, for this we write in the terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository "deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ $(lsb_release -sc) main"
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get --download-only install winehq-devel
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel
sudo apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade

Finally we can verify that we already have Wine installed and also what version we have in the system by executing the following command:

wine --version