Wine 9.16 starts work on driver memory implementation and pbuffer support for Wayland

Wine 9.16 is the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open source software that enables Windows games and applications to run on Linux.

Wine 9.16 is one of the most exciting development snapshots in recent times. Wine 9.16 includes a first Driver Store implementation as well as Pbuffer support within the Wayland driver.

The Microsoft Driver Store was introduced in Windows Vista as a trusted collection of inbox and third-party driver packages in a secure location on the hard disk. Microsoft’s documentation describes the Windows Driver Store as follows:

“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 drive. 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 files contained within it are copied. This includes the INF file and all files referenced in the INF file. All files in the driver package are considered critical to device installation. The INF file must reference all files required for device installation to be 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 in the driver store before it can be used to install devices. Therefore, driver staging and device installation are separate processes.

A driver package is placed into the driver store through verification and validation.”

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

The pixel buffer Wayland driver support in Wine 9.16 is used to handle WGL_ARB_pbuffer and WGL_ARB_render_texture and to promote pbuffer-aware formats.

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

More details about the development version of Wine 9.16 via WineHQ.org.