The NTSYNC Driver For Wine/Proton Is "Broken" For Linux 6.10

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The NTSYNC Driver For Wine/Proton Is "Broken" For Linux 6.10

While Linux 6.10 is poised to merge the initial NTSYNC driver for a Windows NT Synchronization Primitive driver that can help with faster Windows gaming performance under Wine/Proton (Steam Play), the driver isn't complete. The initial patches have been in Greg Kroah-Hartman's char-misc-next branch for several weeks to expose the NTSYNC character device, it isn't the entire patch series. Greg has now marked the driver as "broken" for Linux 6.10...

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

[pharmasolin]

I'm curious how this new driver will impact Icarus performance.

[V1tol]

Not sure about performance impact but I am running NTSYNC built as a DKMS module + custom WINE build for quite some time and I would say this was the most stable gaming experience I ever had. With previous implementations (esync, fsync, futex2 etc) there was always some issues with some games, most often not launching at all or hanging during gameplay. With NTSYNC I had literally zero issues with stability and comparable performance to other sync mechanisms.

[user1]

All I hope is that it will be fully merged before early 2025, so that Wine Stable 10.0 will take advantage of it.

[dekernel]

Not sure about performance impact but I am running NTSYNC built as a DKMS module + custom WINE build for quite some time and I would say this was the most stable gaming experience I ever had. With previous implementations (esync, fsync, futex2 etc) there was always some issues with some games, most often not launching at all or hanging during gameplay. With NTSYNC I had literally zero issues with stability and comparable performance to other sync mechanisms.

Sounds like they matched the characteristics of the sync objects perfectly then. Kudo to them and good for everyone.

[timofonic]

I really hope Elizabeth Figura gets better at making patches and sending them.

I understand the process is cumbersome and archaic, no having something like GitLab or better is a mess. UT this is a very desired feature and extra efforts such as an additional developer would be very good. I hope CodeWeavers consider it!

[aufkrawall]

most often not launching at all or hanging during gameplay.

Would you mind naming some examples where this happened with fsync?

[rabcor]

Not sure about performance impact but I am running NTSYNC built as a DKMS module + custom WINE build for quite some time and I would say this was the most stable gaming experience I ever had. With previous implementations (esync, fsync, futex2 etc) there was always some issues with some games, most often not launching at all or hanging during gameplay. With NTSYNC I had literally zero issues with stability and comparable performance to other sync mechanisms.

I?ve never had any such c-major issues with esync or fsync, just esync being a but slower than fsync sometimes i suppose. but I haev had problems where i kinda wonder if NTSYNC would fix them or not, i just have no way to confirm it cuz building the ntsync module and custom wine to support it seems like more trouble than it's worth.

[timofonic]

Would you mind naming some examples where this happened with fsync?

I'm quite interested in such topic too!

[jacob]

I don't know the details but if this really has advantages over the existing sync primitives, maybe it could be used for other things beyond games (async language runtimes, databases etc come to mind).