Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver (phoronix.com) 12
Valve has added the NTSYNC kernel driver to the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, laying the groundwork for improved Windows game synchronization performance via Wine and Proton. Phoronix reports: For gearing up for that future Proton NTSYNC support, SteamOS 3.7.20 enables the NTSYNC kernel driver and loads the module by default. Most Linux distributions are at least already building the NTSYNC kernel module though there's been different efforts on how to handle ensuring it's loaded when needed. The presence of the NTSYC kernel driver is the main highlight of the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta now available for testing.
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Careful, someone will be along in a few seconds to tell you that NTSYNC won't provide performance improvements over fsync or esync, even though it does. Ask me how I know :P
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It's just fascinating that the best way to increase performance is to emulate Windows' lock behavior and to integrate it into the kernel.
I wonder if this might have uses beyond just WINE for regular applications to tap into Windows' locking.
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My limited but very slightly educated understanding is that it matters more for older applications because newer ones rarely depend on these locks. And that's what people say in the article's comment thread too — some newer games even give slightly worse performance, but there are some very big gains to be had on some older titles. The plan as I understand is for only NTSYNC to remain eventually, although I suspect at least one of the other methods will actually stick around for future implementations
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"This interface is meant as a compatibility tool only, and should not be used for general synchronization."
You'd wonder if the big hosting platforms are already on it - e.g. a cross-platform engine such as Chromium V8; a Win32 implementation somehow tuned to run faster under Linux than 'native' interfaces could then potentially shave milliseconds off each transaction on a server running node.js
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I would suspect that the cross-platform engine is already designed to function on Linux without these primitives, and further that it might not even use them at all on Windows either.
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I get why, but typically these kernel things are meant to be more general purpose than for a single app use case. I
NTSYNC (Score:1)
For those wondering what the fuck NTSYNC is https://docs.kernel.org/usersp... [kernel.org]
Slow before? (Score:2)
Wow, this is excellent news for Linux gaming then because even if the emulation was allegedly slow without NTSYNC, plenty of games already got better fps on Steam/proton than on native windos!
Proton, steamdeck and steamOS are boosting gaming-under-Linux acceptance so well, it is a true joy!
Nice! (Score:1)