It is expected to go upstream next year, and the Wayland driver of Wine has become increasingly mature.

According to CTOnews.com, December 13, although Wine 8.0 has entered the code freeze phase and will not introduce any new features, Wine's major version update next year is expected to integrate the Wayland drivers that many users expect. At present, the Wayland driver is basically mature and is expected to achieve upstream next year.

Wine's experimental Wayland driver was launched at the end of 2020, and subsequent versions have implemented many functions, including Vulkan, multi-monitor settings, HiDPI, cursor clipping, and Wayland keyboard graphics, and are gradually on a par with X11 support on Wine.

Collabora's Alexander Frantez (Alexandros Frantzis) shared the latest Wayland driver updates today, noting that he has split the driver into PE and Unix parts, ready to support WoW64, support cross-process rendering, is compatible with Chromium / CEF software, better supports the DMA-BUFF v4 Wayland protocol, fixes a large number of BUG and introduces many improvements.

As for the uplink driven by Wayland, Frantez said:

Wine did a lot of internal work (such as win32u) last year, and we decided to postpone the uplink of Wayland drivers until we reached a certain level of internal stability. At least from a driver's point of view, things are much more stable now.

Ideally, I hope to start upstream work at some point early next year, after the code base is thawed (which I expect will take some time). Does that sound reasonable?

CTOnews.com learned that the design of the Wayland protocol is more limited than traditional display systems such as X11, so Wine's experimental Wayland driver was proposed late last year, which allows users to run Windows GDI and OpenGL applications directly on the Wayland synthesizer without the need for an intermediate layer to convert from X11 to Wayland for a leaner and more efficient stack.