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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

pixelcluster.dev

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Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#21

Post by dainank »

timpera wrote: post #20
d3Xt3r wrote: post #11

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out. Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday…

I might be in the minority here, but some of the latest Windows updates that dropped in the Insider channel are really cool, and I'm excited to see those coming to main.

Do you have a link for a list of these changes. I am curious.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#22

Post by exceptione »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #18
exceptione wrote: post #14

Great article! I share the same hunch as the author does; when allocating memory ultimately the application itself is in the best position to inform the kernel about the desired stickiness to VRAM. The best a kernel can do is guessing . As a side note, it strikes me how much we owe to young trans people for low level performance engineering.

> As a side note, it strikes me how much we owe to young trans people for low level performance engineering. wtf?

Just an observation.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#23

Post by londons_explore »

I'm mostly excited for the VRAM savings from apps and games which have loads of unused or super rarely used textures.

Game developers often aren't super careful with this stuff, and there could be literal gigabytes of data which isn't used at all.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#24

Post by timpera »

dainank wrote: post #21
timpera wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be in the minority here, but some of the latest Windows updates that dropped in the Insider channel are really cool, and I'm excited to see those coming to main.

Do you have a link for a list of these changes. I am curious.

Sure. The Insider blog tends to be pretty up-to-date: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/

They seem to be focused on performance improvements because of the MacBook Neo pressure and RAM crisis, but right now, I'm mostly excited for the right-click menu and taskbar improvements. You can already do this with third-party software, but it's not the best experience unfortunately.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#25

Post by rvz »

exceptione wrote: post #14

Great article! I share the same hunch as the author does; when allocating memory ultimately the application itself is in the best position to inform the kernel about the desired stickiness to VRAM. The best a kernel can do is guessing . As a side note, it strikes me how much we owe to young trans people for low level performance engineering.

Of course. These are the people that the industry needs who understands proper performance-level engineering.

The commits they authored in [0] match and all of what they have mentioned in the article and this is how you know the author knows exactly what they are talking about and have explained it well.

Puts all the vibe-coders, and the so-called "AI Engineers" to shame. I know that if I ask about the basic system design of amdgpu and drm (direct rendering manager) infrastructure in Linux, a small handful will be able to explain it without using AI or googling.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixelcluster/kernel/-/commits...

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#26

Post by eru »

exceptione wrote: post #14

Great article! I share the same hunch as the author does; when allocating memory ultimately the application itself is in the best position to inform the kernel about the desired stickiness to VRAM. The best a kernel can do is guessing . As a side note, it strikes me how much we owe to young trans people for low level performance engineering.

They'll get old soon enough.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#27

Post by jojomodding »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #9
skew-aberration wrote: post #6

Great writeup, gpuvis looks particularly interesting and glad the kernel is providing tracepoints for performance events. > Not only does the display hardware like scanned-out images to be in VRAM, it also completely skips past the GPU’s virtual memory architecture and works with physical addresses exclusively. Well there's your problem. Only so smart your memory management can be when you have to pay the cost of doi…

> Although presumably this only applies to a small fraction of the VRAM? They did mention they saw 4GiB of eviction for a single 32MiB scan out image. So while I would call the image allocation small, it seems to cause an avalanche of evictions. Amplified by the fact that each frame has one of these images, though I expect subsequent frames might have a better chance of already fitting into evicted space. What I don'…

Or alternatively, instead of evicting it all, can you move the data around in physical memory while updating the page table, so that you can clear a large enough continuous block of physical memory?

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#28

Post by PunchyHamster »

toredash wrote: post #12
d3Xt3r wrote: post #11

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out. Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday…

Didn't we eagerly await on updates in the good old days of Windows?

....No. And those were not good days, unless your definition is fun is reinstalling OS

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#29

Post by zekrioca »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #11

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out. Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday…

[1] Linux 7.2 Reverts DRM Scheduler Change After Serious GPU Regressions: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-72-reverts-drm-sc...

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#30

Post by chongli »

timpera wrote: post #24
dainank wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link for a list of these changes. I am curious.

Sure. The Insider blog tends to be pretty up-to-date: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/ They seem to be focused on performance improvements because of the MacBook Neo pressure and RAM crisis, but right now, I'm mostly excited for the right-click menu and taskbar improvements. You can already do this with third-party software, but it's not the best experience unfortunately.

Are they finally going to fix the issue of having introduced a second right click menu that forces me to click “show more options” literally every single time I want to do anything?
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