A bit of a surprise, really, Wine is making its way to OpenBSD. An experimental port has been submitted, and early testing shows it can already run dozens of 64-bit Windows apps (including quite a few games).
The announcement comes from OpenBSD developer Thomas Frohwein, who made the proposed port public on the OpenBSD mailing list and describes it as possibly the most surprising port proposal of the year.
As Frohwein makes clear, getting Wine to work on OpenBSD has been a team effort with the bulk of the work being done by Andrii and Fabien. The biggest hurdle has been the %gs segment register. Wine needs this, but OpenBSD doesn’t allow applications to set GSBASE directly.
The breakthrough was a software workaround which uses the %gs prefix to generate the instructions, circumventing a major compatibility issue which had previously made getting Wine onto the OS so difficult.
The results are already very impressive. The dev team has successfully tested a good number of 64-bit Windows apps, and most run quite nicely. Even more surprisingly, a recent remaster of The Witcher 3 appears to run quite well (though again you do need to install vkd3d-proton to get the D3D12 via Vulkan to work).
Frohwein also posted links to screenshots and gameplay recordings to show off the progress. He pointed out that the gameplay in the recordings may look a bit less smooth than it actually is, as they were recorded directly from the system using FFmpeg.
Of course, there are still limitations. The biggest one is that WoW64 (Wine’s compatibility layer for running 32-bit Windows apps in a 64-bit environment) doesn’t currently work. The OpenBSD port is therefore limited to 64-bit Windows software.
The built-in Wine test suite is also disabled for now. Some of the tests need access to the X server, and some just hang (though the developers have not seen this in their own real-world testing with a large number of games).
For anyone wanting to play around with the port, Frohwein recommends starting with the 64-bit version of Notepad++ (a fairly light Windows app). He also suggests running Wine under a separate unprivileged user account until additional security restrictions can be implemented.
Importantly, Wine has not yet been officially accepted into the OpenBSD ports collection. The current submission is a work in progress which is being proposed for testing, feedback and review by the OpenBSD developers.
Still, given OpenBSD’s very strict security model and the technical difficulties of the task, getting Wine to run modern Windows apps and indeed some of the more demanding games is a significant accomplishment. If it does eventually make it into the official collection, it would go some way toward extending the range of software available to OpenBSD users.
For more details, see Frohwein’s announcement.
