A CodeWeavers engineer opened a merge request yesterday for Wine to use Mesa’s Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver by default. This would build Zink as a Windows Portable Executable (PE) for allowing OpenGL to go straight to the Vulkan API with the host Vulkan drivers.
CodeWeavers’ Rémi Bernon worked on the code for building Zink as a Windows PE binary for OpenGL-to-Vulkan in Wine. Going this route could simplify testing and lead to less corner cases if Wine usage is focused on this one OpenGL implementation for Windows games/apps running under Wine. Plus, Vulkan is the future and over time hardware vendors will have diminished interest in their OpenGL support and testing.
With the merge request, building Wine with “–disable-mesa” could still be done to avoid this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation if so desired for testing/comparison purposes.
With the merge request in the current form, it would be pulling in Mesa 26.0.3 for the Zink PE library.
We’ll monitor if this merge gets accepted into upstream Wine while those interested in all the details right now can see this merge request.
