Wine begins support for macOS/ARM64

In the next few months, as Apple uses their ARM 64-bit architecture-based self-developed chips for desktop/laptop computers, Wine developers are now also paying attention to these future 64-bit Arm systems in macOS Big Sur.

Wine developer Martin Storsjo has been trying to support macOS + ARM64 and has progressed the code to the point where it can run a “small test executables” on the patched Wine.

The Wine project has always been committed to providing support for 64-bit ARM in the context of Windows RT, or to provide the possibility of running Wine on Android or ARM-driven Chromebooks, and other usage scenarios. Currently, Wine for macOS on ARM64 also has its own challenges. First, macOS on ARM64 has a larger page size. Secondly, macOS does not map anything to the lower 4GB address space, memory mapping cannot be writable and executable at the same time, and other architectural differences.

Although Wine developers have tried their best to support macOS/ARM64, for those users who want to run x86_64 Windows games/applications on macOS/ARM64, this level of support is currently not enough to achieve such goals.