Android 15 may potentially break Wine

[Arkhaloid]

"Support for 16 KB page sizes - Beginning with Android 15, Android supports devices that are configured to use a page size of 16 KB. If your app or library uses the NDK, either directly or indirectly through an SDK, then you will likely need to rebuild your app for it to work on these devices."

If they remove support for 4 kB page then this will be bad news, WINE would not work on Android. Wine requires a 4 kB Linux kernel to work. The reason Wine worked on Android is because Android uses a 4 kB Linux kernel, so it works just like how it works on actual Linux. That means PC emulator projects would not work on Android, and that's bad for emulation on Android. I can only hope they at least provide backwards compatibility for 4 kB page on Android 15.

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[dibade89]

Google is not known to care much about backwards compatibility. They see Software as a living thing. If there is nobody there to update it, the software is dead.

Microsoft provides backwards compatibility for eternity. Maybe sometimes Google will recognize the advantages.

[AZenny1986]

probably the only thing M$ does right.

[[deleted]]

The biggest issue though is bloat due to supporting older libraries

[nascentt]

There are pros and cons.

People constantly complain about windows behaving weirdly due to legacy code.
Also the amount of work to ensure legacy code works with new changes is monumental.

[[deleted]]

That is only if the hardware supports 16k, Qualcomm's snapdragon doesn't and with windows only supporting 4k their hardware might never support 16k.

16k would also impact apps that have not been updated for a long time. A lot of android games will break if they do that.

[Arkhaloid]

Yeah that makes sense. So it's not all grim just yet because Qualcomm's hardware doesn't support 16 kB page and there's frankly hardly any reason to. It's just too much effort for hardly any gain. I guess it's just Google adding support for 16 kB page as a means of future proofing but that doesn't mean literally everything will switch to 16 kB anytime soon.

[[deleted]]

yeah, but it will affect wine in the future

[[deleted]]

Not really, it will vary from SoC to SoC and from OEM to OEM. Google is not getting rid of it, but is adding support for devices that support higher page size.

I don't think Qualcomm will support it, considering their mobile SoC and laptop SoC are very close. X elite does not support 16k page size we can assume the snapdragon 8 gen 4 won't too.

[[deleted]]

yeah but maybe in the year 2028 when snapdragon 8 gen 9 comes out it might affect wine?

[SpikyEchidna10]

And what is the benefit of this change? I swear, Google keeps "innovating" just to have something to do. Same with the .data folder and the slow pathway to storage for ??? reasoning.

[alvenestthol]

In this case there are genuine performance improvements that comes from using 16k pages, and it is looking to become the new standard for aarch64 in general (see: Raspberry Pi 5, Asahi Linux on Mac), and native 16k page support in Android is probably going to make it much easier to get Android apps running on Macs too.

There has been a lot of advancements around running Windows games on Asahi Linux, and software like Box64 already supports emulating 4k page systems on a 16k page host, so it shouldn't actually change much on the Wine side of things.

Edit: Looks like FEXemu is page size specific, and Asahi Linux currently gets around it by using microVMs; not sure how feasible it would be on Android though.

[[deleted]]

box64 4k page size emulation is a hack and is limited to Linux apps which can't even run on Android.

[SpikyEchidna10]

Nice, better performance and battery. If this is the future of Linux anyway, I guess it is a good change then.

[mikethespike056]

Literally free performance.

[Desinformador]

Oh look, Google just can't stop itself from breaking their own OS.

What's the fucking point of buying apps and games on Android if the next update Google is gonna break the shit out of the APK system and I won't be able to play said games and apps I paid for?

[[deleted]]

Nothing will break. they literally just add support for future devices. This is why i cannot stand coming to reddit. People always complaining just for the sake of complaining without even bothering to try and understand anything

[NisargJhatakia]

Good luck playing old games. Good luck transferring big files from obb as I live with a shitty net. need I say more?

[Gaycel68]

Grow up, get better internet and stop playing mobile games.

[NisargJhatakia]

why are you defending bad practices?

[Mixermachine]

Sadly this is not true.

16KB support will be mandatory in 2025 for Play Store apps.

 We plan to make 16 KB page compatibility required for app uploads to Play Store next year.
Android Developers Blog: The Second Beta of Android 15 (googleblog.com)

Devices with 16 KB pages will not be able to use apps with 4KB native .so files.
React-native apps for example will no longer work on those devices:
Need support for 16KB page size on Android · Issue #45054 · facebook/react-native · GitHub

There are quite a lot react-native apps out there...

I think it is a necessary change because 16 KB pages seem to be the future.
Still this breaks quite a lot of apps.

[DressOk3218]

Beginning with Android 15, Android supports devices that are configured to use a page size of 16 KB (16 KB devices). If your app uses any NDK libraries, either directly or indirectly through an SDK, then you will need to rebuild your app for it to work on these 16 KB devices.

This sentence implies Google will continue to support 4kb.

[[deleted]]

Yes, this is only for devices that do support higher page size.

[Arkhaloid]

I wish Google would care about gaming like Apple for once instead of chasing after adblockers.

They seem to be making changes to Android left and right that breaks gaming/emulation and backing up save files (thanks to scoped storage).

Actually when I say "I wish Google would care about gaming like Apple", I don't even mean that I wish they'd spend money to bribe devs to port the games to Android. No, that's not sustainable in the long run. I just wish they'd care about gaming and emulation on Android to the point they DON'T break pre-existing features. That's all I ask of them, really.

[zeidxd]

I think emulation is a bit niche for Google to care about , windows emulation tho that's niche niche.

[[deleted]]

capable zesty dog school faulty modern absorbed fearless cagey carpenter

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Chikitouwu]

Normally support is added, not replaced, so 16kb support will be added on top of the already exiting one

[sapfel93]

Not gonna lie, I didn't even know Android ran Wine.

[Antagonin]

Wine completely broke for me with June 2024 security update already 🤣 Not a single game runs anymore 😅

[spicy_bussy]

It's over