Fedora stakeholders have been eyeing a nicer experience for NTSYNC usage with Wine and Steam Play by being able to have the NTSYNC kernel module load when it’s likely to be used. That approval has now been granted by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) for the Fedora 44 release.
NTSYNC has been in the mainline Linux kernel for a while now and the latest Wine 10.xx development builds along with the upcoming Wine 11.0 stable build allow making use of that kernel code for a faster implementation of emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives. But the issue at hand is the NTSYNC kernel module driver isn’t auto-loaded when needed and without any users currently outside the likes of Wine or Wine-based software like Steam Play (Proton), there’s little use having it unconditionally loaded.
For people who don’t know:
NTSYNC is a Linux kernel feature designed to help Windows programs run better on Linux, especially through compatibility layers like Wine or Proton (used in Steam).
NTSYNC puts Windows-style synchronization objects directly into the Linux kernel.
This means:
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Less emulation
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Faster performance (fewer context switches)
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Better compatibility for modern Windows apps and games
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Lower CPU overhead
Although in many of the tests I have seen, the performance was not actually better in general.
The main benefit so far seems to be not so much a synchronisation that performs better but one that works much more closely to how Windows does it natively thus helping some programs that don’t work well with Wine.
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