NTSYNC Linux Patches Revived To Help Boost Steam Play Gaming Performance

Back in May for the Linux 6.10 kernel the initial bits of the NTSYNC driver was upstreamed for helping to emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Windows games running under Wine/Proton (such as Valve's Steam Play) can enjoy a very nice performance boost. That NTSYNC code for Linux 6.10 wasn't yet in functioning shape and now a half-year later the newest NTSYNC patch series has been sent out for review.

Elizabeth Figura of CodeWeavers today sent out the sixth iteration of the NT synchronization primitive driver patches for the Linux kernel. This is the first update to the patches since the v5 iteration in May. There isn't any functional changes to the patches but simply re-based against the upstream Linux 6.13-rc1 state.

There does remain two open questions around some alterations to the API design that the hope is can be adapted since the currently-merged initial code is hidden behind the "BROKEN" Kconfig option and so there is hope the API design for user-space can still be altered with this patch series. The desired changes are renaming an ioctl to better match NT terminology and changing the objection creation ioctls to return the file descriptors directly.

With no fundamental changes this round for the NTSYNC patches, hopefully there is consensus and this driver work can be upstreamed soon like for the Linux 6.14 kernel in early 2025... Too bad though that these patches have just effectively been sitting around for the past half-year and from the Wine side missing out on the upcoming Wine 10.0 stable release.

The performance gains of leveraging NTSYNC do continue to look very compelling and making us all the more eager to see the rest of these patches hit mainline:

See the v6 patch series for these 28 patches ironing out the NTSYNC driver functionality.