Developers of Arch Linux have announced an important change to improve compatibility of Windows games launched via Wine or Steam (Proton). Following a similar change in the release of Fedora 39, the parameter Sysctl vm.max_map_count, which determines the number of memory mapping regions accessible, has been increased from 65530 to 1048576. This change is included in the package Filesystem 2024.04.07-1.
Prior to this change, using the default value of 65530 could lead to issues when trying to launch various games in Wine, such as DayZ, Hogwarts Legacy, Counter Strike 2, Star Citizen, and The Sims, resulting in crashes. Additionally, the increase in vm.max_map_count is reported to address performance problems in applications that heavily utilize memory.