Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 407 posts

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#101

Post by stackskipton »

magicalhippo wrote: post #60
tayo42 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I rarely see contacting out work go well. This seems like an exception

If you have competent people on both sides who care, I don't see why it wouldn't work. The problem seems, at least from a distance, to be that bosses treat it as a fire-and-forget solution. We haven't had any software done by oursiders yet, but we have hired consultants to help us on specifics, like changing our infra and help move local servers to the cloud. They've been very effective and helped us a lot. We had ta…

Most companies that hiring a ton of contractors are doing it for business/financial reporting reasons. Contractors don't show up as employees so investors don't see employee count rise so metric of "Revenue/Employee" ratio does not get dragged down and contractors can be cut immediately with no further on expenses. Laid off employees take about quarter to be truly shed from the books between severance, vacation payouts and unemployment insurance.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#102

Post by xmprt »

mstank wrote: post #98
MarleTangible wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over time they're going to touch things that people were waiting for Microsoft to do for years. I don't have an example in mind at the moment, but it's a lot better to make the changes yourself than wait for OS or console manufacturer to take action.

Valve... please do Github Actions next

I wonder what Valve uses for source control (no pun intended) internally.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#103

Post by torginus »

loeg wrote: post #54
dijit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, but you have IO Completion Ports… IO_Uring is still a pale imitation :(

IOCP is great and was ahead of Linux for decades, but io_uring is also great. It's a different model, not a poor copy.

I think they are a bit different - in the Windows kernel, all IO is asynchronous on the driver level, on Linux, it's not.

io_uring didn't change that, it only got rid of the syscall overhead (which is still present on Windows), so in actuality they are two different technical solutions that affect different levels of the stack.

In practice, Linux I/O is much faster, owing in part to the fact that Windows file I/O requires locking the file, while Linux does not.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#104

Post by dabockster »

packetlost wrote: post #96
MarleTangible wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over time they're going to touch things that people were waiting for Microsoft to do for years. I don't have an example in mind at the moment, but it's a lot better to make the changes yourself than wait for OS or console manufacturer to take action.

Kernel level anti-cheat with trusted execution / signed kernels is probably a reasonable new frontier for online games, but it requires a certain level of adoption from game makers.

This is a part of Secure Boot, which Linux people have raged against for a long time. Mostly because the main key signing authority was Microsoft.

But here's my rub: no one else bothered to step up to be a key signer. Everyone has instead whined for 15 years and told people to disable Secure Boot and the loads of trusted compute tech that depends on it, instead of actually building and running the necessary infra for everyone to have a Secure Boot authority outside of big tech. Not even Red Hat/IBM even though they have the infra to do it.

Secure Boot and signed kernels are proven tech. But the Linux world absolutely needs to pull their heads out of their butts on this.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#105

Post by dabockster »

dijit wrote: post #49
benoau wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It just works" sleep and hibernate. "Slide left or right" CPU and GPU underclocking.

“it just works” sleep was working, at least on basically every laptop I had the last 10 years… until the new s2idle stuff that Microsoft and Intel have foisted on the world (to update your laptop while sleeping… I guess?)

From what I read, it was a lot of the prosumer/gamer brands (MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS) implementing their part of sleep/hibernate badly on their motherboards. Which honestly lines up with my experience with them and other chips they use (in my case, USB controllers). Lots of RGB and maybe overclocking tech, but the cheapest power management and connectivity chips they can get (arguably what usually gets used the most by people).

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#106

Post by onraglanroad »

Arainach wrote: post #80
trueismywork wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have ACLs on linux too

ACLs in Linux were tacked on later; not everything supports them properly. They were built into Windows NT from the start and are used consistently across kernel and userspace, making them far more useful in practice. Also, as far as I know Linux doesn't support DENY ACLs, which Windows does.

Yes it does.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#107

Post by heywoods »

trinsic2 wrote: post #88
crtasm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their games and systems tie into huge gambling operations on 3rd party sites If you have 30mins for a video I recommend People Make Games' documentary on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g

Yeah, im sorry. Valve is the last company people should be focusing for this type of behavior. All the other AAA game companies use these mechanics to deliberate manipulate players. IMHO valve doesn't use predatory practices to keep this stuff going.

Just because they weren’t the first mover into predatory practices doesn’t mean they can’t say no to said practices. Each actor has agency to make their own operating and business decisions. Is Valve the worst of the lot? Absolutely not. But it was still their choice to implement.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#108

Post by dabockster »

Fiveplus wrote: post #17

Valve is practically singlehandedly dragging the Linux ecosystem forward in areas that nobody else wanted to touch. They needed Windows games to run on Linux so we got massive Proton/Wine advancements. They needed better display output for the deck and we got HDR and VRR support in wayland. They also needed smoother frame pacing and we got a scheduler that Zuck is now using to run data centers. Its funny to think tha…

> This is the best kind of open source trickledown.

We shouldn't be depending on trickledown anything. It's nice to see Valve contributing back, but we all need to remember that they can totally evaporate/vanish behind proprietary licensing at any time.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#109

Post by tharkun__ »

spauldo wrote: post #89
pbh101 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature. (And same for Windows to the degree it is more inconsistent on Windows than Mac)

It's not the development model at fault here. It's the simple fact that Windows makes up nearly the entire user base for PCs. Companies make sure their hardware works with Windows, but many don't bother with Linux because it's such a tiny percentage of their sales.

Except when it doesn't. I can't upgrade my Intel graphics drivers to any newer version than what came with the laptop or else my laptop will silently die while asleep. Internet is full of similar reports from other laptop and graphics manufacturers and none have any solutions that work. The only thing that reliably worked is to restore the original driver version. Doesn't matter if I use the WHQL version(s) or something else.

Re: Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

#110

Post by bogwog »

mikkupikku wrote: post #3

> SCX-LAVD has been worked on by Linux consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve It seems like every time I read about this kind of stuff, it's being done by contractors. I think Proton is similar. Of course that makes it no less awesome, but it makes me wonder about the contractor to employee ratio at Valve. Do they pretty much stick to Steam/game development and contract out most of the rest?

Valve has a weird obsession with maximizing their profit-per-employee ratio. There are stories from ex-employees out on the web about how this creates a hostile environment, and perverse incentives to sabotage those below you to protect your own job.

I don't remember all the details, but it doesn't seem like a great place to work, at least based on the horror stories I've read.

Valve does a lot of awesome things, but they also do a lot of shitty things, and I think their productivity is abysmal based on what you'd expect from a company with their market share. They have very successful products, but it's obvious that basically all of their income comes from rent-seeking from developers who want to (well, need to) publish on Steam.

Post reply on HN