Dormison

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Dormison is the Wine engine used by Sevoflurane to run Windows Steam games on macOS.

Sevoflurane downloads the engine and manages its settings. Start with Sevoflurane's setup instructions to use it. Dormison is built for x86_64 macOS and runs under Rosetta on Apple silicon.

Like the app, it is named after an anesthetic.

What it does

Feature	What you can use
Graphics	DXMT for Direct3D 10/11, DXVK over MoltenVK, D3DMetal from Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, or Wine's wined3d. Choose a renderer per bottle or game in Sevoflurane.
Window scaling	Resize supported game windows while the game keeps drawing at its original resolution. Scale the picture with Lanczos, MetalFX Spatial, Anime4K or CuNNy.
Frame rate	Show a frame-rate counter, a frame-time card, or a card with the game's CPU, the GPU's load, power and temperature from the game's View menu. Cap the frame rate per game or while it runs.
Input	Use raw mouse movement when a game holds the cursor for mouse-look. Play with an Xbox controller over Bluetooth through XInput or DirectInput, rumble included.
Game settings	Change per-game settings for the next launch while Steam stays open.
Mac integration	Show a game's title and icon in the Dock, show a program's own menus in the macOS menu bar, and run supported NW.js games with native macOS NW.js.

Compatibility depends on the game, Mac and graphics translator.

Build or contribute

The build guide covers the toolchain, configuration, packaging and releases. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to report a problem and verify a change.

Each release has an r<N> tag and includes the engine tarball, checksum, Ed25519 signature, engine-info.json and the diff against wine-staging-base. Sevoflurane finds engines through its signed release manifest.

Technical details

This repository is Wine 11.16 with wine-staging 11.16 applied (tag wine-staging-base), plus Dormison's changes. git diff wine-staging-base shows the complete diff, and CHANGES.md describes each release.

Changes from Wine

Everything below is absent from Wine 11.16 and wine-staging 11.16.

Graphics

• D3DMetal host support for Game Porting Toolkit 3.0 and 4.0, including 4.0's host-callback table.
• A present-time upscaler for Metal, OpenGL and GDI windows (Lanczos, MetalFX Spatial, Anime4K, CuNNy), with a final filter and an in-game View menu.
• wined3d hands the upscaler the game's own frame, at its own resolution.
• Resizable game windows that keep the game's resolution and aspect ratio.
• An FPS counter and frame-time graph, fed by a per-process stats page that the app also reads, with a detail level that adds the game's CPU, the GPU's load, power and temperature.
• A frame limiter on every Metal and OpenGL present path, set per game or from the View menu while the game runs.
• A renderer pinned to one game through WINEDLLPATH_PREPEND loads whole, so a game can run DXMT while its bottle runs another renderer.
• SEVO_GPU_* adapter identity, plus RTX 50 and RX 7000/9000 device IDs in wined3d.
• Vulkan portability enumeration on, so Windows programs see MoltenVK.
• On a Metal 4 GPU (M3 and later), a present with display sync off returns at once, and the upscaler encodes one frame at a time.

Windows, input and the Mac

• Each game gets its own Dock tile with its Steam title and icon. Steam's tools, and any process started with SEVO_QUIET=1, stay out of the Dock and off the screen.
• A game's Dock tile or Finder copy, opened on its own, starts the game through Sevoflurane.
• NW.js games run on native NW.js, with a Steamworks stub for achievements and stats that loads 32- and 64-bit Steamworks alike.
• Cursor confinement through the window server; raw mouse movement for mouse-look.
• A "not responding" sheet for a game that ignores quit, and crash reports for faults on threads Wine did not create.
• A program's own Win32 menu bar can live in the macOS menu bar, with the strip in its window cropped away, Ctrl shortcuts shown as their Command equivalents, and choices sent back by id or by position as the program asks.
• Gamepads reach games with winebus's SDL bus off or failed, through the IOHID bus. Xbox One S, Elite 2 and Adaptive controllers over Bluetooth LE count as Xbox pads.
• Tray icons can stay out of the menu bar. A background program lets the display sleep.

Processes, sync and memory

• msync+: Mach-based in-process synchronization (WINEMSYNC=1), Dormison's fork of CrossOver's msync.
• Critical sections leave the lock available on release, as on Windows: a running thread may take the lock back before a woken waiter arrives, and LockCount reads as Windows encodes it.
• Per-program settings files, read at every process start.
• A native arm64 wineserver.
• Fixes for Steam's 20-second network wait and for Unity/Mono TLS reads.
• SEVO_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE for 32-bit games.

Audio, media and text

• Bundled GStreamer (LGPL build) for Media Foundation and DirectShow movies, MPEG program streams included.
• An HEVC decoder transform for Media Foundation. It and the H.264 decoder decode through VideoToolbox in hardware.
• CoreAudio applies each stream's volume, channel by channel, to its own samples, so other programs' playback and the Mac's volume stay intact and a muted capture records silence.
• A Discord Rich Presence bridge.
• Japanese font families mapped onto the bundled IPAGothic/IPAPGothic and the Mac's Hiragino Mincho.

Release

• wine --version names the release.
• Releases are signed, and each ships its diff against wine-staging-base and a manifest of every file with its sha256 and origin. Packaging refuses a driver or server that does not match the sources.

Compared to CrossOver

This comparison is against the CrossOver 26.3 source release, which is Wine 11.0 with CodeWeavers' patches and no wine-staging.

Taken from CrossOver

• msync, forked as msync+ with fixes CrossOver 26.3 lacks:
  • WaitAll is granted by wineserver under a freeze of the whole set, so a grant is a set that was whole at one instant and is consumed once, before the waiting thread returns; a query never reads the set half consumed.
  • WaitAll reports an abandoned mutex.
  • NtReleaseMutant reports NT's previous count.
  • Freed object indexes are reused from a stack.
  • A process exits when its wineserver dies.
  • A thread that dies between setting an object and waking its sleepers leaves them asleep on an object that reads available. When a process dies, wineserver wakes every object it held a handle to, once when its last thread is gone and again when its death is confirmed, and does the same for a thread terminated in a process that lives on.
  • SIGUSR2 to wineserver sweeps for threads asleep on an object that has stayed available and unchanged for 100 ms, wakes them, and reports each object, its holders and any recent death that shared it.
• Rosetta workarounds: the lretq 32→64 transition, MXCSR restore, XGETBV/CET/debug-register handling, and retranslation of written code. Dormison's cross-process write invalidation walks the range region by region, where CrossOver restores the first page's protection over the whole range.
• D3DMetal glue: __wine_unix_call, the Microsoft-ABI trampoline, and the GS base kept on Darwin thread storage with the TEB and PEB mirrored.
• The Mono TLS mirror at %gs:0x1780. Dormison also reserves the pthread key behind that offset.

In Dormison, not in CrossOver 26.3

• Wine 11.16 and wine-staging.
• The upscaler, the D3DMetal 4.0 callback table, and the Metal 4 present ordering, with presents that do not wait when display sync is off.
• Critical sections that leave the lock available on release, where CrossOver, like Wine, hands the lock to the next waiter.
• Per-channel stream volume applied to the samples; CrossOver sets it on the device, which moves the Mac's volume.
• A native arm64 wineserver.
• The Steam network-wait fix, Vulkan portability enumeration and SEVO_GPU_*.
• Window-server cursor confinement.
• localtime_r in ntdll, which the PEB mirror needs to be safe.
• The Dock shim, NW.js runner, Discord bridge, stats page and per-program settings.

In CrossOver 26.3, not in Dormison

• A 32-bit-only bottle mode under WoW64, and Rosetta's 16-bit LDT fix.
• wined3d on Vulkan by default for Direct3D 10/11.
• Per-title fixes: GTA IV/V, Counter-Strike 2, Cities: Skylines II, and BC7 decoding for Tomb Raider I–III Remastered.
• Launcher fixes for Epic, Battle.net, Rockstar, GOG Galaxy and Ubisoft Connect.
• PlayStation controller rumble over Bluetooth, an Xbox 360 USB bus, and the microphone permission prompt.
• CrossOver's desktop and Office integration.

Graphics and presentation

The engine packages DXMT for 64-bit and 32-bit Direct3D 10/11 programs, and DXVK over MoltenVK. Sevoflurane can import D3DMetal from Apple's Game Porting Toolkit.

D3DMetal support includes the __wine_unix_call export, Microsoft-ABI wrappers for toolkit callbacks, and the host-callback table used by D3DMetal 4.0. Wine keeps the GS base on Darwin thread storage, mirrors the TEB and PEB, and maps win32u.so before the toolkit resolves its symbols.

The optional presenter scales Metal drawables, OpenGL window drawables and GDI window surfaces. An OpenGL drawable is a framebuffer object whose swap lands in an IOSurface the presenter reads, which is what puts the upscaler over wined3d's Direct3D 9; multisampled, stereo, floating-point and 10-bit drawables stay on an OpenGL view, and OpenGLPresenter=N keeps every one there. The presenter supports Lanczos, MetalFX Spatial and compiled mpv shader packages, including fragment and compute passes used by Anime4K and CuNNy. A final filter resamples the output. Configure it with Upscaler, FinalFilter and PresenterLog, or SEVO_UPSCALER, SEVO_FINAL_FILTER, SEVO_PRESENTER_LOG and SEVO_SHADER_DIR.

A running program has a View menu: Upscaler, Final Filter, Show Frame Rate (FrameRate=Y or SEVO_FPS=1 shows it from the first frame), Show Frame Time Graph (FrameRateGraph=Y or SEVO_FPS_GRAPH=1), Show Picture Details, Overlay Detail and Frame Rate Limit. Overlay Detail picks the frame rate alone, the frame-time card, or the card with a row for the game's CPU, the GPU's load, the Mac's power draw and its CPU temperature (OverlayLevel=1|2|3 or SEVO_OVERLAY_LEVEL). Frame Rate Limit offers Off, 30, 40, 45, 60, 90 and 120 (FrameRateLimit=<n> or SEVO_FPS_LIMIT=<n> sets it from the start); frames leave on fixed deadlines on every Metal and OpenGL path, with or without the upscaler. The counter and graph read the same per-process stats page as Sevoflurane.

NativeMenuBar=Y or SEVO_MENU_BAR=1 moves a program's Win32 menu bar into the macOS menu bar, between the app menu and View, and crops the strip from its window while the window's geometry stays as on Windows. Menus carry the check marks and disabled items the program sets as a menu opens, and a modal dialog disables them. A choice arrives as WM_COMMAND with the item's id, or as WM_MENUCOMMAND with its position and menu when the menu has MNS_NOTIFYBYPOS. The driver's View menu reads Picture when the program has a View menu of its own.

ResizableWindows preserves the game's rendering size and aspect ratio while allowing the presentation window to resize. LinearMouse supplies raw displacement when the program holds the cursor for mouse-look.

Processes and compatibility

Dormison includes msync+, its fork of CrossOver's msync, which synchronizes in process through shared memory, __ulock waits and a Mach port to wineserver (WINEMSYNC=1). It is maintained as commits on main. Rosetta workarounds cover 32-to-64-bit transitions, written executable code and signal contexts. The transition uses lretq, and signal handling preserves the thread's MXCSR state.

At process start, Wine reads <prefix>/.sevo/bottle.env, then <prefix>/.sevo/apps/<exe>.env, where <exe> is the executable's lowercase basename. Game settings therefore apply at the next launch. WINEDLLPATH_PREPEND adds a directory ahead of the built-in DLLs. A renderer placed there loads whole: its DLLs that Wine has no counterpart of load without a file in the prefix, and a DLL whose unix half is missing from that directory takes the engine's own.

SEVO_GPU_* variables set the adapter identity, memory and driver metadata reported to Windows programs. Without a driver override, an unknown vendor receives NVIDIA driver metadata.

Steam startup fixes cover Vulkan portability enumeration, initial network notifications, display-mode switching, root-device enumeration and reentrant local-time conversion.

The dock shim (libsevodockshim.dylib) hides Steam's infrastructure processes from the Dock and gives games their own titles and icons. For supported NW.js games, it starts the native runtime. The Steamworks stub stays in Wine and serves achievements and stats to the native game over loopback.

License

Wine's: LGPL 2.1 or later, see LICENSE. The fonts under fonts/ carry their own licenses (COPYING.*). msync is CrossOver's, LGPL. The presenter, the dock shim and the Steamworks stub are © 2026 kageroumado, LGPL 2.1 or later.