NTSYNC driver support heads to Wine in a new Merge Request

With the NTSYNC driver landing ready for the Linux kernel 6.14 release, there's now an open Merge Request to actually hook up support for it in Wine.

Opened by developer Elizabeth Figura, the request notes:

This introduces a faster implementation of signal and wait operations on NT events, semaphores, and mutexes, which improves performance to native levels for a wide variety of games and other applications.

The goal here is similar to the long-standing out-of-tree "esync" and "fsync" patch sets, but without the flaws that make those patch sets not upstreamable.

The Linux "ntsync" driver is not currently released. It has been accepted into the trunk Linux tree for 6.14, so barring any extraordinary circumstances, the API is frozen and it will be released in its current form in about 2 months. Since it has passed all relevant reviewers on the kernel side, and the API is all but released, it seems there is no reason any more not to submit the Wine side to match.

Hopefully we shall see it soon in a fresh Wine development release. There's a few comments on it, and no doubt more will come as the code gets reviewed, so it will likely need some tweaks before it gets accepted into Wine.

Once ready and you have both an up to date version of Wine and Linux kernel 6.14+, you'll hopefully then get the benefits of improved Windows game compatibility on Linux. And, compared to plain Wine, better performance too. Eventually then we'll see it in a new release of Valve's Proton.