Fedora stakeholders have been [1]eyeing a nicer experience for NTSYNC usage with Wine and Steam Play by being able to have the [2]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.

Fedora's plan that is now approved is for having the NTSYNC kernel module enabled by select packages via the RPM recommendations such as for Wine and Steam. Wine is in the Fedora repository while RPM Fusion packages like Valve's Steam could be adapted to recommend this NTSYNC auto-loading package along with various game launchers.

The new RPM package being recommended will then set a modules-load.d configuration file so the NTSYNC kernel module will get auto-loaded at boot. The change was [3]approved by FESCo for the Fedora 44 release in the spring.

FESCo also granted approval in recent days for Fedora 44 to ship Ruby 4.0, Python 3.15 for Fedora 45 (an early change proposal), dropping QEMU 32-bit host builds, and a permanent stable updates policy exception for GIMP to more easily ship updates within major release series (e.g. 3.0.x or 3.2.x).



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-44-NTSYNC-Proposal

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/NTSYNC

[3] https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3510