MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2026|No. 19298
Technology · OpenBSD · Software

Wine Compatibility Layer Ported to OpenBSD

A new port of the Wine compatibility layer has been released for OpenBSD, enabling the execution of 64-bit Windows applications on the operating system.

The Wine compatibility layer now supports running 64-bit Windows applications on OpenBSD.
The Wine compatibility layer now supports running 64-bit Windows applications on OpenBSD. · Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash
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Hello, In what might the most surprising port proposal of the year, I'm proud to present a new port for wine. This has been a collective effort, after some of the prodding at the %gs/gsbase question. The gates swung open with Andrii's software solution to the %gs issue - explanation to me: "can't set gsbase, so we are emulating %gs prefix on commands". Overall, the heavy lifting was done by Andrii and Fabien - kudos. Turns out there is a ground-swell with interest in wine, different than even 5-10 years ago because a lot of Windows software has since moved to being 64bit. We have since tested several dozens of 64-bit Windows software, mostly successfully. Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well (requires adding in vkd3d-proton; see README). Biggest limitation is that WoW64 doesn't work, so 32bit Windows software is still a no-op. You can check .exe/.dll easily with file(1) - if it says something like "MS-DOS executable PE for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit", then it's 32-bit. The builtin-tests are disabled for now. Enabling them is pretty involved as they need access to the X server and multiple tests still hang, however that was not observed in the real life testing with a good number of games. This is still being worked on. For those who wish to test it, I suggest Notepad++ as a small, fairly straightforward piece of 64-bit Windows software. Note that this is (as always) run-at-your-own-risk software. Consider setting up a separate, non-privileged user for this until we can explore if some fencing in, potentially with unveil(2) can be done. Appreciate testing of the port draft and contributions by: brynet@, bentley@, pertho (on irc.libera.chat #openbsd-gaming), vl_ms. ok?

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