On August 22, IT Home reported that tech media Linuxiac published a blog post yesterday (August 21). The report said that the open-source compatibility layer Wine released update 11.16, adding support for VA-API hardware video decoding, updating Wine Mono to 11.3, and first adding ARM64 support.

IT Home note: Wine is an open-source compatibility layer that allows running Windows applications on Unix-like operating systems (such as Linux, macOS, and BSD).

VA-API (Video Acceleration API) is an open-source multimedia hardware acceleration standard API led by Intel. It allows operating systems and applications (such as browsers and media players) to directly use the hardware-accelerated graphics cores of the GPU to offload the computational workload of video encoding/decoding (Encode/Decode).

Wine Mono is an open-source compatibility package tailored for the Wine environment, used as an alternative implementation of Microsoft .NET Framework (mainly 4.8.1 and earlier versions). It is based on the well-known cross-platform .NET open-source framework Mono Project, and is mainly used to allow systems such as Linux and macOS to run Windows applications and games that depend on .NET through Wine.

The built-in Wine Mono in Wine has been updated to 11.3 and now includes ARM64 support for the first time. This change will improve Wine's compatibility on ARM architecture devices and better run Windows applications that depend on Microsoft's .NET Framework interfaces.

Wine 11.16 also improved exception handling for ARM64EC (Microsoft's application binary interface that allows ARM64 code to coexist with emulated x64 code) and fixed 35 issues. These include Steam failing to start, as well as a problem in Wine 11.15 that caused WineWayland to stop working.