News: 0001487298

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Wine 9.16 Begins Working On Driver Store Implementation, Pbuffer Support For Wayland

([WINE] 4 Hours Ago Wine 9.16)


Wine 9.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications on Linux.

Wine 9.16 is one of the more exciting development snapshots in recent memory. With Wine 9.16 there is an initial Driver Store implementation as well as Pbuffer support within the Wayland driver.

Microsoft's Driver Store was introduced in Windows Vista as a means of a trusted collection of inbox and third-party driver packages in a secure location on the hard disk. Microsoft's [1]documentation describes the Windows Driver Store as:

"The Driver Store is a trusted collection of inbox and third-party driver packages. The operating system maintains this collection in a secure location on the local hard disk. Only the driver packages in the Driver Store can be installed on a device.

When a driver package is copied to the Driver Store, all of its files are copied. This includes the INF file and all files that are referenced by the INF file. All files that are in the driver package are considered critical to the device installation. The INF file must reference all of the required files for device installation so that they are present in the Driver Store. If the INF file references a file that is not included in the driver package, the driver package is not copied to the store.

The process of copying a driver package to the Driver Store is called staging. A driver package must be staged to the Driver Store before the package can be used to install any devices. As a result, driver staging and device installation are separate operations.

A driver package is staged to the Driver Store by being verified and validated."

With Wine 9.16, the SETUPAPI code now installs to the Driver Store within the SetupCopyOEMInf(), the ability to uninstall from the Driver Store from SetupUninstallOEMInf(), and other prep work.

The pixel buffer Wayland driver support in Wine 9.16 is for handling WGL_ARB_pbuffer and WGL_ARB_render_texture along with advertising pbuffer-capable formats.

Wine 9.16 also has more prototype objects implemented in MSHTML and ships with 25 known bug fixes.

More details on the Wine 9.16 development release via [2]WineHQ.org .



[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/install/driver-store

[2] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases/wine-9.16



phoronix

"If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system."
(By Linus Torvalds)