Thomas Frohwein has proposed a new port of Wine, the compatibility layer that runs Windows software, for OpenBSD. The effort has been a collective one, with Andrii and Fabien doing much of the heavy lifting. Andrii's software workaround for the %gs segment register issue, which emulates the %gs prefix on commands because gsbase cannot be set, opened the way for the port.
Interest in running Windows software on OpenBSD has grown, largely because much Windows software has moved to 64-bit. The team has tested several dozen 64-bit Windows programs, most of which run successfully. Even the recently released remaster of The Witcher 3 runs well, though it requires adding vkd3d-proton.
The main limitation is that WoW64 does not work, so 32-bit Windows software is still unsupported. The built-in tests are disabled for now, since enabling them requires access to an X server and several tests still hang, although this was not observed in real-world testing with a good number of games.
Users who want to try the port are advised to start with Notepad++ as a small, straightforward 64-bit application. Because running Windows software carries risk, testers should use a separate, non-privileged user account until the team can explore sandboxing, potentially with unveil(2).
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing