Valve continues to push Linux into a promising future in gaming. After numerous open source projects to promote the creation of new video games for GNU / Linux and also others such as Proton to bring native Microsoft Windows video games, or their APIs for virtual and augmented reality, he now has a new ambition for the Linux kernel and has proposed some cool things.
It is true that Linux is now not the favorite platform for gaming, but Valve has a lot of ambition for the kernel to be the future of the video game and I ended up replacing Windows. Valve CEO Gabe Newell himself assured that Linux was the future of video games. Now they are suggesting changes to the kernel itself to make it more gaming friendly, thereby attracting more developers.
After the catastrophe that was Windows 8 for gaming, when Newell suggested that, they began to create their Steam Machine, Steam OS and other projects that we now know. But the truth is that Microsoft learned its lesson and changed all that to improve Windows 10. That improvement caused interest in Linux as a gaming platform to be lost, and that is why they started their project Wine-based Proton to run native software without porting it, and they also included DXVK to translate DirectX 3D calls to Vulkan.
But that's not what they want they want to go further, as some very hardware demanding video games do not run well on Wine. That's why they announced changes to the Linux kernel itself to make it more gaming friendly. Valve's suggestions go through troubleshooting the experimental override for esync, based on the kernel's eventfd () functionalities. And that requires an extension of the futex () syscall to expose an additional bit for optimal thread pool synchronization that will improve the performance of certain video games.
Gabriel Krisman Bertazi, ingeniero de Collabora, también comentó que están proponiendo cambios en la propia biblioteca glibc y libpthread para estas características multiproceso de los videojuegos. Todos estos cambios podrían traer hasta un 4% de mejora en algunos títulos que se ejecutan sobre Proton. Parece que la comunidad han aceptado estas propuestas, y lo único que están debatiendo es el cómo y algunos límites para incluirlo en la rama del kernel.