Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent in the char/misc updates for Linux 6.10 alongside the other areas of the kernel he oversees. Among the char/misc changes is adding the [1]NTSYNC driver that exposes the /dev/ntsync character device for use by the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton). But for Linux 6.10 the driver is effectively "broken" as most of the feature patches have yet to be included.

NTSYNC was submitted for Linux 6.10 to [2]emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Wine/Wine-based software can have an easier and more efficient time doing so. In turn this NTSYNC driver can [3]yield massive performance wins for Windows games running on Linux:

While the initial driver patches were merged to char/misc and now in turn within Linux 6.10 Git, much of the enablement work wasn't accepted in time. Thus for Linux 6.10 [4]the new NTSYNC driver is marked as "broken" , so it won't even be built for normal kernel builds.

Hopefully for Linux 6.11 or sometime soon the rest of the NTSYNC patches are upstreamed for yielding this massive boost to Windows games on Linux.

The [5]char/misc merge for Linux 6.10 also includes the usual IIO driver updates, Microsoft Hyper-V updates, some Snapdragon X Elite patches, and the routine smothering of other random patches.



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

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Merging-NTSYNC

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTSYNC-Linux-Update-February

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-NTSYNC-Broken

[5] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=5f16eb0549ab502906fb2a10147dad4b9dc185c4