Wine 8.10 lands with uTorrent crash fix and other performance improvements

WineHQ has announced the availability of Wine 8.10. As a point release, it doesn’t come with a massive list of new features but the improvements that do arrive should improve performance, cursor clipping, and the handling of programs that use locale and timezone data.

For those who don't know, Wine is a tool that allows you to run Windows programs on Linux and macOS, with varying degrees of success. The name Wine originally stood for 'Wine is not an emulator' as no emulation or virtualization goes on while Wine runs Windows programs.

Here is a list of new changes in this update and what benefits they bring:

• All PE->Unix transitions go through the syscall interface. This means that Wine now uses the syscall interface for all transitions between PE (Portable Executable) and Unix memory spaces. This change should improve performance and stability.
• Mouse cursor clipping improvements. The mouse cursor clipping code has been improved, which should fix some issues with the mouse cursor being clipped off the screen.
• Support for virtual memory placeholders. Wine now supports virtual memory placeholders, which are used by some applications to improve performance.
• Locale and timezone data updates. The locale and timezone data have been updated to the latest versions. This should fix some issues with applications that use locale-specific data.

Perhaps more interesting than the improvements in this update are the bug fixes. Several well-known pieces of software should work better in this update. The bug fixes are as follows:

• Multiple isolation-aware applications fail to load (MSN Messenger Live 2009, Lync 2010, Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, Quicken 201X)(embedded PE manifest search should support ISOLATIONAWARE_MANIFEST_RESOURCE_ID)
• uTorrent 2.2.0 hangs on startup (FD_WRITE event is reported over and over in WSAEnumNetworkEvents for a bound UDP socket)
• Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express 4.0/6.0 loader failure due to missing msvcrt.dll dependency (native netapi32.dll imports msvcrt functions)
• Cygwin's mintty.exe crashes with a stack overflow
• TwitchTest crashes on unimplemented function IPHLPAPI.DLL.GetPerTcpConnectionEStats
• Animated Puzzles crashes on start
• .NET 3.5 Checkbox checkmarks should be black instead of "Foreground" color
• Honeygain crashes on unimplemented function IPHLPAPI.DLL.GetCurrentThreadCompartmentId
• PmxEditor 0.2.7.5 doesn't start after Wine 8.4.
• ntdll: NtDuplicateToken has wrong prototype
• user32:msg gets an extra WM_NCPAINT in ShowWindow(child, SW_SHOW)
• Chinese IME no longer works in Naver LINE since Wine 8.9
• wininet:http - test_secure_connection() fails on Windows and Wine

Wine 8.10 is a development release so you’ll need to head over to the downloads page, find installation instructions for your Linux distribution, and ensure you follow the instructions for the Development branch.