The Vodka project is developing a compatibility layer designed to run Windows software on Linux by utilizing original Windows binaries. The system architecture consists of four layers, including a user-space API implementation and an OS-independent core that manages system calls and hardware abstraction.
The developers introduced a utility called vodka-decant, which automates the retrieval of Windows dependencies by installing official ISO images. This approach ensures legal compliance and reproducibility by using standard tools like DISM to deploy the environment. The system supports creating isolated 'worlds'—configurations that can be forked in 0.12 seconds.
Performance benchmarks compared the 32-bit Windows version of nginx 1.31.6 running on Vodka against the same binary running on Wine 11.16. The tests used a configuration with keep-alive enabled and logging disabled, under a load of wrk -t8 -c100.
Results show that nginx.exe on Vodka performs six times faster in requests per second compared to Wine. In terms of CPU time per request, Vodka is nearly eight times more efficient than Wine. The performance reaches 80% of the native 64-bit Linux build of nginx.
