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Can you game core allocation on Apple Silicon?

eclecticlight.co

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Re: Can you game core allocation on Apple Silicon?

#3
post #2

Article says: >Neither the developer nor user appears to have access to any facility to adjust run-time policy Which is false, there is an API for this: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

There’s another runtime policy in the kernel that overrides the user policy for various reasons. That’s what the author is talking about.

For example you can force a process to run on efficiency cores by using the background QoS, but you have no way of moving that process back to performance cores other than relaunching it.

Re: Can you game core allocation on Apple Silicon?

#5
gamecore sounds like a style of music I’d be really into.

(4am thoughts are sometimes intrusive.)

Also if you’re interested in this kind of thing, “operating systems in three easy pieces” was surprisingly good. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

It’ll teach you all the history behind the OS decisions we take for granted now. I was delighted to learn that early OS’s used to have only one global lock. Sounds silly, but it’s extremely effective — HN does the same.

It has a bunch of chapters presenting these kinds of “games” user programs can play to get an advantage against the schedulers.

Also it’s $10 for instant access to a pdf. I was amazed. Buying a book is always such a hassle, except this time it was 30 seconds.

Re: Can you game core allocation on Apple Silicon?

#7

gamecore sounds like a style of music I’d be really into. (4am thoughts are sometimes intrusive.) Also if you’re interested in this kind of thing, “operating systems in three easy pieces” was surprisingly good. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ It’ll teach you all the history behind the OS decisions we take for granted now. I was delighted to learn that early OS’s used to have only one global lock. Sounds silly…

The easy part being the "get out of the way" for a full game core. Gamedevs almost always prefer "bare" metal, with free choice of librarys and structures. If there was no OS beyond the bootloop, cheerio..

Re: Can you game core allocation on Apple Silicon?

#8

gamecore sounds like a style of music I’d be really into. (4am thoughts are sometimes intrusive.) Also if you’re interested in this kind of thing, “operating systems in three easy pieces” was surprisingly good. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ It’ll teach you all the history behind the OS decisions we take for granted now. I was delighted to learn that early OS’s used to have only one global lock. Sounds silly…

My understanding is that many OS kernels into the 1980’s didn’t even have a single lock: Because the only thing that could switch the sole—this is assumed to be a uniprocessor—running kernel “thread” was a hardware interrupt, critical sections would be protected by simply disabling interrupts.

Re: Can you game core allocation on Apple Silicon?

#10
post #8

gamecore sounds like a style of music I’d be really into. (4am thoughts are sometimes intrusive.) Also if you’re interested in this kind of thing, “operating systems in three easy pieces” was surprisingly good. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ It’ll teach you all the history behind the OS decisions we take for granted now. I was delighted to learn that early OS’s used to have only one global lock. Sounds silly…

My understanding is that many OS kernels into the 1980’s didn’t even have a single lock: Because the only thing that could switch the sole—this is assumed to be a uniprocessor—running kernel “thread” was a hardware interrupt, critical sections would be protected by simply disabling interrupts.

Uniprocessor kernels even to today will do that. Linux without CONFIG_SMP and CONFIG_PREEMPT simply disables interrupts when the code asks for a lock. https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/kernel-locking/uniproces...
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