Completed NTSYNC Driver Merged For Linux 6.14: "Should Make Many SteamOS Users Happy"

The "char/misc" pull request was submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window and already merged to the Linux Git tree... As expected, the completed code around the NTSYNC driver has landed for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitives as a big win to Wine / Steam Play (Proton) Windows gaming on Linux.

The NTSYNC driver has long been in the works for better matching the semantics of the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for faster performance of Windows games on Linux. While the NTSYNC code was initially upstreamed to the kernel, it was left in a "broken" state and only now with Linux 6.14 is being completed so it's actually usable for Linux gamers. This was expected as I wrote about earlier this month that the completed NTSYNC was slated for Linux 6.14 after making it into the "-next" branch for char/misc.

In submitting today's char/misc pull request for Linux 6.14, Greg Kroah-Hartman commented:

"ntsync driver to handle Windows locking types enabling Wine to work much better on many workloads (i.e. games). The driver framework was in 6.13, but now it's enabled and fully working properly. Should make many SteamOS users happy. Even comes with tests!"

Linus Torvalds raised no issues with any of the char/misc code and has merged the code for this next kernel release.

Per the prior benchmarks shown on the patch series compared to upstream vanilla Wine without NTSYNC:

The other char/misc code this cycle includes various IIO, FPGA, Coresight, MHI, Binder, and other driver updates.

Linux 6.14-rc1 is due out next Sunday while the stable kernel should be out in March. Linux 6.14 is expected to power the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 out-of-the-box while hopefully the Wine/Proton patches for NTSYNC usage will be merged soon.