Wine 11.22 adds AVX support to x86 emulation on ARM64

The Wine project released the Wine 11.22 development release on November 13. This update adds AVX support to x86 emulation on ARM64, which addresses a common reason Windows games and applications fail to launch on ARM Linux machines. While this allows more software to run, code relying heavily on AVX may run slower than native code because it must emulate wide vector instructions on the 128-bit NEON units found on ARM hardware. This change does not affect Steam Deck users because the device uses an x86 AMD chip.

Image: Hardware Busters

Wine 11.22 also adds address space randomization to improve security by making program and data locations in memory less predictable. Other changes include the move to Unicode CLDR 49 for locale data, improved Tahoma font glyph metrics, and the reimplementation of Document Type Definition validation in MSXML. The release includes 34 bug fixes.

This development release serves as preparation for Wine 12, which is due early next year. Reports say Valve is expected to release Proton 12 following the Wine 12 release.