Steam on FreeBSD
github.com
github.com
Steam on PC-BSD - How to Get Wine Running 3D Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B04EuZ9hpAI
Steam on PCBSD 2 - Using Wine as a Streaming Client: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ88B8aWdk0
FreeBSD's Linux "emulator" consists in a substituted syscall table and a kernel module for implementing syscalls that aren't native to FreeBSD (like epoll).[0][1]
Here's an example of what that means. When a FreeBSD binary wants to delete a file it calls the syscall unlink(2). So it's executing as a regular old binary, does a regular syscall, specifies the unlink syscall number, the kernel looks up that syscall number in that binary's (FreeBSD's) syscall table, and jumps to that code.
When you execute a Linux binary on FreeBSD you also execute it as a regular old binary except that you specify to use the Linux syscall table instead of FreeBSD's (IIRC this is done by the elf loader, so you're not even saying "linuxrun ./mybinary"; you're just saying "./mybinary"). It's executing more or less identically to a FreeBSD binary except that when it's time to delete a file it looks up the unlink system call in the Linux syscall table and jumps to that instead. Some of the arguments or calling conventions are different so most of the calls have a shim to rearrange stuff for the FreeBSD equivalents before calling into the same code the FreeBSD binaries are using. This is the same thing that FreeBSD does to support ABI versions for old versions of itself, to support SysVR4 binaries[2], and it's the same trick that SmartOS's Linux zones use as well[3]
What this means is that if your binary isn't using a lot of linuxisms, they execute at nearly identical performance.
Wine is using a pretty similar trick--trying to directly execute the binary while intercepting win32 API calls--but the impedance mismatch between posix and win32 is much higher so the cost of those shims is going to be much higher. The DeleteFile win32 API function takes a LPCTSTR that needs to be decoded, its return values have different meanings, and its semantics around files opened by other processes is different. And obviously for more complex calls the difference widens: the difference between simply speaking x11 over a socket vs calling MessageBox is much larger.
[0]: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html
[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-emulation/insi...
Isn't nopass a bad idea?
Edit: I'm not a BSD user - this is a genuine question, not a complaint.
(NB: "nopass" for doas is the equivalent of sudo's "NOPASSWD".)
Like most things relating to security, whether its use is "a bad idea" or not depends on many, many things: the attack surface, whom you are trying to defend against, other mitigations in place that protect the host, etc.
As a general rule, I'd say that yes, it is a bad idea.
However, I have an OpenBSD 5.9 laptop sitting here next to me on my desk at home:
$ cat /etc/doas.conf
permit nopass jeremy
Is it "a bad idea" to use "nopass" in this case? Strictly speaking, sure, but I'm really not too worried about it. There are a limited number of people who have physical access to it: myself, my girlfriend, friends & visitors we have over, and the few others who have a key to my house -- along with, I suppose, anyone who might break in, law enforcement armed with a warrant, and so on. I have, mentally, calculated the risk of the laptop being compromised via the use of "nopass" and deemed this risk acceptable.
On the other hand, I have OpenBSD servers in data centers and even though the physical security is very good in those facilities, I do not allow "nopass" on those machines -- primarily because they do not have some of the "mitigations" that this laptop on my desk does.
Your login passwords should only be given to the login prompt, which you hopefully have some reasonable faith in its integrity (if not; game over already).
If you're typing your password into terminals after login, that's a great place to steal your password. I would much prefer to use pam_krb5 to "kinit on login", and then by sudo to authenticate your session.
Then you shouldn't ever be tempted to type your password into potentially untrusted programs.
Of course, if you're sure you have no malware on your computer, then there's also no need for a sudo password -- nobody but yourself could be running commands!