A change proposal filed for next year’s Fedora 44 release wants to aim for a nice experience when running Wine or the Proton variants supporting the Linux kernel’s NTSYNC driver for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives.
Since Linux 6.14 the NTSYNC kernel driver has been ready although for upstream Wine the changes on its side for using NTSYNC are still pending. The Wine merge request appears inactive now for the past three months for getting its NTSYNC integration merged.
On the Fedora side, Fedora kernel builds are already shipping with the NTSYNC kernel module built. However, the change proposal for Fedora 44 comes down to the NTSYNC kernel module not being loaded by default. The change proposal amounts to adding a new /usr/lib/modules-load.d/ file for ensuring the NTSYNC kernel module gets loaded. We’ll see if this change proposal gets the approval of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) in the weeks ahead or if some more selective handling is desired since admittedly only a fraction of Fedora users are running Wine/Proton and thus no real reason to load the ntsync kernel module unconditionally everywhere so would likely make more sense being setup as a dependency of the Wine RPM or similar packages.
The F44 change proposal argues that while the upstream Wine support for NTSYNC isn’t yet merged, there are various community-made Proton versions with the NTSYNC support included that would benefit from this change to enhance Linux gaming. We’ll see what comes of this NTSYNC proposal for Fedora 44.
