Tech

Amazon seeks Linux experts for Luna, its streaming service

The Google Stadia fiasco seemed to have left the way clear for Windows to be the server technology that would dominate video game services via streaming, especially seeing NVIDIA GeForce Now, Amazon Luna and obviously Game Pass bet on Microsoft technology. However, it seems that Amazon Moon could take a turn in the future, since the company founded by Jeff Bezos has published three job offers (1, 2 and 3) for hire software engineers specialized in Proton, DXVK and Mesa.

At this point, it is not necessary to explain what each of the components are that those future Amazon employees would work on. Proton is the Wine-based, Valve-powered compatibility layer that makes it easy to run Windows video games on Linux and macOS. DXVK is the renderer used by default by Proton to translate DirectX 9, 10 and 11 instructions to Vulkan on the fly, while Mesa is the standard stack in charge of supporting the graphics API (OpenGL and Vulkan) in Linux. Although VKD3D is not mentioned, it will surely be among the technologies to cover seeing that it translates DirectX 12 to Vulkan.

The technologies mentioned in the job offers are C, C ++, Mesa, Proton, Wine, DXVK, Linux kernel, Windows kernel, DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL, that is, nothing really new, although obviously the level of knowledge required is high.

Amazon has explained that future employees will solve “Tough glitches on the Linux graphics stack, from Linux kernel to graphics libraries. You will work on graphics technologies such as DirectX, Vulkan, DXVK, and OpenGL. It will delve into graphics performance issues, provide solutions that allow Windows games to run on Linux, and make contributions to Wine / Proton open source. “.

The part of “Will make contributions to Wine / Proton open source” sounds quite promising as it points to Amazon could return the patches and modifications that it would develop to the original projects instead keep it to herself. If so, it would be very good news for Linux Gaming, which would gain an important contributor through the Luna service.

Is Amazon Luna preparing a migration to Linux and Proton or will it give the option to choose a system? It is still too early to say anything, but these hires suggest that the company is going to seriously study these possibilities or at least one of them. On the other hand, the preponderance of Mesa leaves the door open to the use of another brand of GPU, here being Intel and its XeSS in theory better candidates than Radeon and FidelityFX Super Resolution, and that without counting the ray tracing support.

Using Linux and Proton would make Amazon not dependent on the technology of a rival corporation in the cloud computing segment. On the other hand, it recently migrated the base of its distribution to Fedora, thus opening the door to facilitate the inclusion of recent versions of Mesa and the kernel.

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