We are very pleased to announce that today’s CrossOver Preview release includes Linux ARM64 support for the very first time. While this is still a work in progress, the preliminary results are so impressive that we feel confident declaring that ARM64’s got game with CrossOver. Read on to learn more about the development behind this exciting technological advance and how you can test it out.

Support for running CrossOver on ARM64 has been many years in the making. The Wine 8.0 release in January 2023 included two major advances that were prerequisites for ARM support: PE conversion and the implementation of WoW64 thunks. Both of these projects were multi-year efforts that brought Wine much closer to matching Windows behavior, allowing for the beginning of work to support ARM64EC mode dlls.

In January 2024, ARM64 support was released in Wine 9.0 for running native Windows ARM binaries and emulated i386 code. In May 2024, the CrossOver team completed work making a native ARM64 CrossOver client. The Wine 10.0 release in January 2025 included full support for ARM64EC to run emulated x86-64 code. Tackling ARM64EC involved not only significant Wine development, but also extensive compiler development to essentially implement a brand new architecture. The existing LLVM toolchain already had support for ARM64, and Wine developers worked on the ARM64EC support that was included in the LLVM 21 release. Finally, once ARM64EC development was complete in upstream Wine, the CrossOver team integrated FEX into CrossOver to handle i386 and x86-64 emulation and our QA team completed an extensive testing sweep.

After years of hard work, we really wanted to see what our code was capable of, and what better way to do that than to start playing some of our favorite games? Our QA team got to work testing on our System76 Thelio Astra powered by an Ampere® Altra® 128 core 3Ghz processor and NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti, running Ubuntu 24.04 with NTSync support. We are grateful to Ampere® and System76 for providing us with Ampere desktops and servers to assist our development and testing efforts. While there were many games that aren’t yet running flawlessly, we saw many demanding games running with great performance:

Eager to check this out for yourself? Current CrossOver customers can sign up for CrossOver Preview and access the latest build here and submit reports to share their experience with our product team here.

While gaming is exciting and a great way to show off the performance of CrossOver Linux ARM64, there are many more possibilities. For example, we envisage CrossOver as a viable solution for migrating enterprise Windows workloads to Linux for improved security and reduced bloat. There’s also more work to be done to bring CrossOver to even more platforms.

We look forward to hearing about your experience with CrossOver on ARM64! We will share more exciting updates in the future, so be sure to subscribe to stay in the loop.

About Meredith Johnson *Meredith has been with CodeWeavers since 2019, and currently wears both the QA Manager and CrossOver Product Manager hats. After getting her PhD in linguistics, she somehow stumbled into the Free and Open Source Software world. When she isn’t testing CrossOver, she’s probably perfecting yet another bean stew, jogging slowly, buying even more linen tunics, doing a face mask or doting on her perfect chunky baby. *