NetBSD Made Progress Thanks To GSoC In Its March Towards Steam Support

Ultimately the goal is to get Valve's Steam client running on NetBSD using their Linux compatibility layer while the focus the past few months with Google Summer of Code 2019 were supporting the necessary DRM ioctls for allowing Linux software running on NetBSD to be able to tap accelerated graphics support.

Student developer Surya P spent the summer working on compat_netbsd32 DRM interfaces to allow Direct Rendering Manager using applications running under their Linux compatibility layer.

These interfaces have been tested and working as well as updating the "suse131" packages in NetBSD to make use of those interfaces. So the necessary interfaces are now in place for Linux software running on NetBSD to be able to use accelerated graphics though Steam itself isn't yet running on NetBSD with this layer.

Those curious about this DRM ioctl GSoC project can learn more from the NetBSD blog. NetBSD has also been seeing work this summer on Wayland support and better Wine support to ultimately make this BSD a better desktop operating system and potentially a comparable gaming platform to Linux.