Easy NTSYNC Arrives For Steam Users With GE-Proton 10.10

Long-time Slashdot reader drinkypoo writes: GloriousEggroll has released GE-Proton 10.10, a heavily breathed-upon version of Valve's version of Wine used with Steam, and the big news is that it supports NTSYNC by default on supported platforms. That means amd64 systems whose kernel is built with the CONFIG_NTSYNC option, available in the 6.14 series or later or for 6.12 or 6.13 as a patch.

NTSYNC is support for certain fine-grained Windows NT scheduling primitives for Linux, the use of which improves performance and compatibility for Windows programs. Maximum performance gains range from modest to dramatic, with most programs falling towards the lower end of the spectrum, but it can substantially improve minimum frame rates for some titles. You can observe that ntsync is being used from the console output, e.g. using "tail -f ~/.steam/steam/logs/console-linux.txt". You will see messages like "wineserver: NTSync up and running!"

A lot of retro YouTubers

[rsilvergun]

Are turning to Linux and proton because the compatibility with Windows 11 has gotten so bad for older games

Re: A lot of retro YouTubers

[simlox]

The kernel driver in Linux, I don't think there is one for Darwin. Apparently, emulating some NT semaphore/muted with futex took too much overhead- probably because more than one native lock operation is needed to emulate one NT lock operation.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom runs best on wine.

Re: A lot of retro YouTubers

[GloryWacky]

The most clever "your mom" joke I've seen in a while.

Re:A lot of retro YouTubers

[tlhIngan]

It's actually less Windows 11's fault and more the game's fault. It's just that previous versions of Windows let the game get away with bad practices like use-after-free, or assuming an allocated page will be zeroed (it would be if it's a new allocation - for security reasons, but not if a page is reused by the same process - it's just things like Windows might tend to give you a reused page rather than incur the overhead of having to visit the memory manager for a new page). Some uninitialized data structures got corrupted in this way because they were relying on the fact that somehow one part was zeroed.

Several bugs were found of that class. Proton could easily result in the same issues since things like that are also not guaranteed by the OS.

So it is less compatible simply because it doesn't retain the same bugs. Granted, this wasn't like Windows 95 where Microsoft needed to make sure applications ran just as they did on Windows 3.1 or DOS and they had to write compatibility shims to get around them. Though I think Microsoft also said they dumped all those shims as cruft that was really adding bugs to the code.

Re: A lot of retro YouTubers

[paul_engr]

Way to have a deadass wrong take.

Re:

[mjwx]

Are turning to Linux and proton because the compatibility with Windows 11 has gotten so bad for older games

Dealing with MS has always been insufferable, it's just that until recently there wasn't really a good alternative.

Re: but does it work with office?

[simlox]

Refuse to share doc and docs files. Then you don't have the problem. Is it at work? Then it is your employer's stupid choice. My employer writes everything in Latex - even my contract.

Re:

[crobarcro]

Thanks, but unfortunately I live in the real world, I love LaTeX and have tried hard with LibreOffice, but compatibility with Word and Powerpoint specifically isn't good enough.

Re:

[Tough Love]

You don't want to run Microsoft shit at all. Just screw up your courage. Life is too short to be made a prisoner by some stupid word processor misfeatures.

Re:

[crobarcro]

I tried for multiple years to use only LibreOffice in my small company, but had to give in, too many external people need to use word docs, and MS has been canny enough to make sure other platforms are no able to be compatible enough. I can't force these people to do what I want, it just creates friction. I've tried your way, very hard, and it didn't work.

Excel macros in Amazon marketplace template

[tepples]

Is it at work? Then it is your employer's stupid choice.

I guess it's the whole industry's "stupid choice" to sell products on Amazon then. When I worked for an online toy seller in 2010-2019, Amazon's marketplace service provided an Excel spreadsheet with macros used to perform local preflight validation before sending a product listing or inventory change file to the server. You'd put in product listing information, and it'd tell you what you would probably need to change before the server would accept the file. This was optional but highly recommended to reduc

Re:

[Samare]

My employer writes everything in Latex - even my contract.

Are you self-employed?

Re:

[LainTouko]

Since Libreoffice runs on Windows and is free, anything which Libreoffice can parse correctly is not, in fact, broken for others. They (or the company or IT department which controls what they can install) are merely choosing to break things by using MS Office outside of a context where everyone who will ever need to edit the file is a Windows fan, because they can get away with it. (It may still be necessary in practice to submit to their domination, but it should always be clear that it is the MS Office u

Re:

[crobarcro]

I'm a significant shareholder in my small company and am senior and in charge of IT. I use Linux as my daily driver, nobody else in the company does. We tried for a few years to go all Libreoffice for cross-platform compatibility. I'm here to tell you that Libreoffice isn't compatible enough, and sometimes you don't have a choice but to deal with other's word docs, e.g. external lawyers, suppliers, clients etc. . I had problems internally with Libreoffice not starting properly on some windows machines, it's

ntsync

[ledow]

This nonsense again.

It's a very niche feature that benefits only a small handful of particular games, and the other existing and competing "syncs" already do a pretty good job (and the benchmarks almost always compare having none of those enabled to ntsync, rather than actually compete).

It rears its head every few months over the last couple of years, so I assume the person who wrote the patch has a good PR firm.

It's always sold as some miraculous huge leap forward for Steam / Steam Deck / Proton / Wine and yet all those places say "no, not really, it helps a little for some games".

Go read all the mailing lists about this and you'll see it's really not such a huge deal.

At best it'll end up as a switch somewhere that, for a few games, you'll enable instead of the various other syncs that Proton is using in the wild already, but most stuff will just carry on as normal.

It's really so much snakeoil that "gamers" with absolutely no understanding of Wine et al leap upon every time it's talked about as if it's the sole saviour of modern gaming somehow.

Re:

[Tough Love]

It's just one of the countless small improvements that finally resulted in Windows games running faster on Linux than Windows.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

It's a very niche feature that benefits only a small handful of particular games, and the other existing and competing "syncs" already do a pretty good job

It's true that the other sync options are pretty good. My fine summary stated that most titles will not receive major improvements. This sync option is better for some titles, as you say, which I see as positive. You also say it has positive effects for some titles. Thanks for agreeing.

Re:

[F.Ultra]

It is a big thing for WINE since it is the sole version of any of the other performance solutions that have been accepted upstream in WINE. It is also the sole performant solution that is 100% compatible with how Windows handles synchronization objects (which ofc is less of a problem for games since they tend to use only a small subject of the functionality offered).

Re:

[wildstoo]

Woah, did an ntsync developer sleep with your wife or something?

While it's certainly not going to double framerates in all games it's definitely not snakeoil. Some games show no improvement vs wineserver and fsync, others show fairly massive improvement; it depends on how many syscalls the game makes and the specific hardware it's running on.

PC gamers have always been excited by free performance boosts and why wouldn't they? Some of them need to rein in their expectations, sure, but that's no reason to piss

Re:

[Samare]

so I assume the person who wrote the patch has a good PR firm

It was written by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] who both market their own version of Wine and are paid by Valve to work on Proton.

Re:

[codebase7]

This "nonsense" is also the solution moving forward, the other syncs are not being kept. Which means more and more of Wine / Proton is going to depend on it and the other syncs (if maintained) are going to have their work cut out for them.

BTW: The only reason you're complaining in the first place is because you've been using some downstream build that enables patches from Wine-Staging. Yes, those builds already saw most of the performance enhancements because of the other attempts. That's what you get fro

Re:

[ledow]

Rubbish.

ntsync relies on a very particular kernel module being present on Linux-only systems.

The other syncs will all have to stick around for the foreseeable, e.g. MacOS is never going to implement ntsync.

And actual compatibility is not an issue, that's just bug-fixing. But requiring a kernel module to operate AND actually only publishing benchmarks against "no sync at all" (in effect) is disingenuous. It benefits a few apps that are in particular cases of tight CPU loops on sync calls which presume NT-s

Well, at least

[Chris Mattern]

It's not NSYNC.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

NSA_KEY is already taken too.

Re:

[codebase7]

Of course not, they already told the other patches: Bye Bye Bye!