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PayPalValve have released SteamOS 3.7.20 Beta coming with just two changes, and one of them is very interesting to see arrive on SteamOS. Since it's currently in Beta you need to opt into it via Settings > System > System Update Channel.
Here's what Valve listed as the changes:
General
Non-Deck
- Added ntsync driver.
- Enabled polkit for the InputPlumber dbus interface and resolved a potential race condition for the InputPlumber interface, addressing CVE-2025-66005 and CVE-2025-14338.
The ntsync driver is most interesting as it's something that arrived with Linux kernel 6.14 back in March 2025. It's a way of matching closer with Windows NT synchronization primitives to provide accuracy and good performance especially for Windows games on Linux running through a compatibility layer.
Valve were in no rush to add ntsync support to SteamOS, as Proton already has something similar it already uses with fsync. But the original Wine project that Proton is built from added support for ntsync back in Wine 10.16, so we may see Proton 11 (whenever it releases) use it by default. In short - eventually we might see some games perform better, although they should already perform quite well with fsync in Proton. But this will be less Valve have to maintain externally. You can also try ntsync with GE-Proton right now since it added support for it some time ago.
As for the other change, InputPlumber is an open source input routing and control daemon for Linux. You can use it to combine any number of input devices and translate their input into a variety of virtual device formats. Nice to see more security holes getting plugged.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Still, in the future, ntsync might become the default, so the sooner it's supported the better, I'd say.
Quoting: datablobThat's cool, I think. Heh. I still don't entirely understand what ntsync does in practice, I saw that CachyOS also adopted it a while ago and read something about timing consistency. Can anyone elaborate?Liam did a bit of an overview when it was about to land in Linux 6.14.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/01/ntsync-driver-for-improving-windows-games-on-linux-with-wine-proton-should-finally-land-in-linux-kernel-614/
The gist is that Windows has a function for a program to wait for multiple conditions and Linux doesn't. Wine first emulated that function in user space with the waits that Linux did have, but that wasn't great. But putting Windows in the kernel isn't great, either. So there have been progressing attempts to have the function working with proper performance whilst minimising the amount that having Windows games running bothers the kernel devs. ntsync is the third attempt, I think, with the first two approaches improving performance and the third improving correctness.
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