Linux 6.10 To Merge NTSYNC Driver For Emulating Windows NT Synchronization Primitives

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 6.10 To Merge NTSYNC Driver For Emulating Windows NT Synchronization Primitives

Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Merging-NTSYNC

[cassiofb-dev]

I'm playing on Linux for more than a year and I'm sure hyped for this patches and new mesa optimizations!

[Kjell]

The performance of NTSync5 driver is tremendously better than Fsync in my experience

NTSync Feedback Thread

https://github.com/Frogging-Family/wine-tkg-git/issues/936#issuecomment-2048806055

(Current status: there's a memory leak. Hopefully it will be resolved in time for 6.10)

[ptr1337]

Very nice. Looking forward for a patch, which can be applied on top of proton's wine tree.
Talked with the Author of this patch and they will work on it, when both PRs are merged.

Really great addition for the gamers on linux and can provide a quite noticeable performance improvement under heavy cpu load.

[shmerl]

Nice! I was waiting to stop using esync.

[aufkrawall]

Nice! I was waiting to stop using esync.

And why do you not use fsync? There is basically no game that doesn't work with it.

[shmerl]

And why do you not use fsync? There is basically no game that doesn't work with it.

Fsync is a mess to use due to no easy way to apply those patches to Wine. esync is easy to apply from Wine staging, so that's what I've been using.

[oiaohm]

And why do you not use fsync? There is basically no game that doesn't work with it.

https://github.com/Frogging-Family/wine-tkg-git/issues/936

Yes one person already quoted this bug The developer using ntsync was testing with applications that don't work with esync or fsync. There are games that have not been working with fsync and are documented in wine and proton bugs.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/1/17/312

There is a nice long write up detailing where the limitations in esync and fsync options are.

So more games will work correctly after ntsync comes part of core wine/proton and more commonly used kernel.

[aufkrawall]

Fsync is a mess to use due to no easy way to apply those patches to Wine.

Every "gaming Wine" spin-off has it, precompiled via Lutris or whatever, or e.g. -tkg build script. Or you can just add non-Steam games in Steam to run with Proton.
Really no reason to stick with bad esync if you know what to do. Every game without exception has run flawlessly for me with fsync.

[HEL88]

Linux wants so much to be like Windows that it even implements functions with 'deprecated' status like NtPulseEvent() into its kernel.