Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020

For too long, Windows has been the de facto platform for any serious gaming on computers. In fact, there is still much resistance by game studios from supporting multiple platforms, which can be explained in part by the specific challenges of porting them. Computer games are prime examples of complex applications who need to squeeze every bit of processing performance possible out of the system, usually making use of very specialized engines who exploit very specific features of the platforms they were designed for. Instead of waiting for studios to port their games, Wine, and the more recent Proton effort, attempt to fully emulate the original environment these games rely on. Much of this work, though, can only be done efficiently with specialized support by the kernel. In this talk, we will review the recent efforts to improve Linux support for emulation, always with the goal of enabling and speeding up recently released games on Linux. In addition, we will discuss specific pain points for emulation on Linux that we plan to solve in the near future.