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Some information on why Wine is not going to be using DXVK

By - | Views: 40,921

It seems things aren't all rosy between CodeWeavers and DXVK, as developer Henri Verbeet has written into the Wine Development mailing list to give more details.

The developers working on Wine seem to be going their own way with their Vulkan plans and most thought this was due to DXVK being written in C++, a different license and so on. Apparently, that's not the main issue as Verbeet notes and they didn't pull any punches:

In February 2018, we reached out to Philip Rebohle—the author of DXVK—to start a conversation around whether there were any areas we could cooperate on. One obvious area was the vkd3d shader compiler, which translates Direct3D shader byte code to SPIR-V (much like DXVK has to do), but there would have been other possibilities, like sharing the DXGI implementation, or using a scheme like vkd3d where Wine's d3d11 could have optionally loaded DXVK as a regular shared library. That e-mail went unanswered. Now, I appreciate that different people have different ideas about what's acceptable and what isn't, but personally I think that's extremely rude and uncivilised.

They continued:

Nevertheless, e-mail gets lost sometimes, sometimes people are busy, everyone gets a second chance. So a few months later, since I was organising WineConf 2018, I sent Philip a personal invitation to attend WineConf, and perhaps discuss things there. That invitation went unanswered too, at which point I was pretty much done with DXVK.

It is my understanding that since then both Jeremy White and CodeWeavers' partners at Valve have tried reaching out to Philip on the subject, but evidently with little success.

Personally, this all feels like it's getting a little too heated for me. Still, it shows that there's clearly some communication issues that need to be solved between all parties involved for the better of us all who use Wine, DXVK and so on.

Hopefully the situation can be resolved in an amicable way, calling someone out in such a way doesn't seem particularly fair though. I've picked up on emails months after they were sent before, it's very common when you're busy and working alone. I did speak to Philip Rebohle after this, who said they would rather stay out of "unnecessary drama in public".

The good news, is that they are working on an official wined3d Vulkan backend going by a codename of Damavand which will be interesting to see.

You can see the mailing list entry here.

Cheers, Phoronix.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Vulkan, Wine
23 Likes
About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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65 comments
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qptain Nemo Jan 25, 2019
So... there is a piece of free / open source software out there that is of demonstrably high quality and that you personally admit to be of value, that is there for you to just grab as it's under the zlib license, but you're not going to use it because the developer didn't respond to your "notice me senpai" emails? Lol k.

I absolutely don't mind there being two competing implementations, and I have no doubt that not everybody in the wine project shares this rationale and sentiment, but this is really silly.
Liam Dawe Jan 25, 2019
Here's some extra perspective for you.

CodeWeavers emailed me a while ago out of the blue to thank me for my coverage of Proton. I emailed them to ask for an interview, they didn't reply. A week later one of them is on a podcast with BoilingSteam.

I didn't get salty about it, it's just the way it is. It's why I find the situation so bemusing. Emails don't get answered all the time.
jens Jan 25, 2019
  • Supporter
I get that a posting like this on the wine mailing list is a welcome feast for sites like phoronix or here, though I very much doubt that highlighting this posting in the news and the obviously following public speculations and assumptions will do any good.
Best of my wishes to both projects and their maintainers, it's still astonishing how the Linux gaming world has changed last year...

Edit: I realize that my posting could be read differently than I meant it to be. Clarified that my point was about the news articles itself.


Last edited by jens on 25 January 2019 at 6:15 pm UTC
Shmerl Jan 25, 2019
Quoting: jensI get that a posting like this on the wine mailing list is welcome feast for sites like phoronix or here, though I very much doubt that taking this into public and the obviously following speculations will do any good.

Well, it's better to take this public, to resolve whatever blockers they have, than just to abandon all collaboration. Not sure if Henri tried other means of resolving it, before resorting to such measures.


Last edited by Shmerl on 25 January 2019 at 5:37 pm UTC
t3g Jan 25, 2019
Henri needs to grow up and be less of a prick. If Proton is the direction going forward, then I’m fine with that. Valve can continue to leverage WINE and just use DXVK.

I hated using WINE as-is. Had to install an Ubuntu PPA, tinker with winetricks and playonlinux, and hope it would boot. Proton in Steam just works and the installs of any game I want is painless.


Last edited by t3g on 25 January 2019 at 5:57 pm UTC
Brisse Jan 25, 2019
How to reach out efficiently:
Write something controversial on a public mailing list.
Have "news"-articles about it on websites we know the other person frequents.
Congratulations, you have now successfully established communications. :D
denyasis Jan 25, 2019
Quoting: liamdaweHere's some extra perspective for you.

CodeWeavers emailed me a while ago out of the blue to thank me for my coverage of Proton. I emailed them to ask for an interview, they didn't reply. A week later one of them is on a podcast with BoilingSteam.

I didn't get salty about it, it's just the way it is. It's why I find the situation so bemusing. Emails don't get answered all the time.

Interesting. On the other hand, in my profession, that would be unacceptable. I'm required to read and respond to all emails within 24 hours. I'm blue collar too, and work out of a car, so I would have to stop what I'm doing in the field, drive to an office and log on.

You have no idea how awesome it was when get finally got email access on our car computers (and our personal phones)! I imagine I get far fewer emails, 50 ish a day, than you guys.
benjamimgois Jan 25, 2019
Saddly this is not new in the opensource realm. Duplicated efforts due to Gigantic egos always generate duplicated / triplicated efforts. This is the same old DEB x RPM, KDE x Gnome, upstart x systemv , Snap x Flatpak.... While opensource is fighting it self, closed source OS like Windows and OSX concentrate efforts in what really matter.
Mohandevir Jan 25, 2019
Quoting: benjamimgoisWhile opensource is fighting it self, closed source OS like Windows and OSX concentrate efforts in what really matter.

Please define what really matters... Personally I still see the OpenSource having an edge in that department. Isn't 70% of cloud based services and servers running on OpenSource?


Last edited by Mohandevir on 25 January 2019 at 6:36 pm UTC
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