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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

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Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#261

Post by hnlmorg »

trentnelson wrote: post #216
stillpointlab wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gripe (that I literally crashed out on recently after maining Fedora for the first time) is top of my list for annoyance/frustration with Linux as a desktop. I now have btop permanently running in a Terminal and I habitually Alt-Tab to it to watch my swap. As soon as my free memory gets less than 1 Gb I kill any Firefox tabs (the memory black hole). I know this won't be popular, but Linux people have some kind o…

Possibly an unpopular opinion on this forum, but virtual memory has always been one of the strengths of the NT kernel. (And integration between the cache manager, virtual memory manager, file system (NTFS), overlapped I/O, completion ports, and threading. It’s a very robust and performant foundation when leveraged correctly.)

It might be now, but the default settings back in the 2000 and XP era were far from optimal.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#262

Post by hnlmorg »

pjmlp wrote: post #232
manwe150 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is Linux has fork, while Windows doesn’t, so Linux cannot do accurate accounting (without wasting a lot of memory) while Windows can.

macOS is a UNIX as well, and it isn't the only UNIX that manages to do accounting properly.

macOS includes a GUI user land whereas Linux is just a kernel.

So Apple can build a whole user-controlled GUI workflow around memory exceptions, which Linux cannot.

Maybe what needs to happen is new Linux syscalls + signals for DEs to utilise for building memory exception UIs? But the problem then with that is you’re impacting the portability of those DEs. So some maintainers might still refuse to work with Linux to provide this.

That all said, I’m pretty sure KDE does provide GUI tools for when this kind of scenario arises.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#263

Post by qurren »

krisknez wrote: post #34

I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.

I just solved the problem by shoving 192GB of RAM into my desktop and 96GB into my laptop and called it a day.

Of course I did this when RAM was cheap but one of the best decisions I have ever made in life.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#264

Post by 0x457 »

frollogaston wrote: post #252
d3Xt3r wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fair comparing Arch and Windows as they are two very different types of OSes. Arch is bleeding edge and it is completely normal and expected to be prone to breakages. It's not meant for the average PC user, it's meant for experienced users who're comfortable with troubleshooting technical issues, reporting bugs, and know and are happy to downgrade packages/rollback to previous snapshots etc. On the upside, A…

Do you mean Arch is getting more bleeding edge kernel versions? I don't see what else that's Arch-specific would cause those issues.

Arch is rolling release distro. That story would be different even if it was rolling release linux vs fixed release linux.

That said, even some fixed release linux distros break things almost every release. That's because Windows updates is just windows base + kernel + drivers, while most linux updates are everything all at once with no distinction between base system and user applications. Plus windows and macOS present certain things more or less as a blackbox to user - I never had broken DE and keyboard layout switcher during windows update, while every ubuntu update used to break everything for me.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#265

Post by 0x457 »

nickjj wrote: post #139
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain a little more please. I thought that graphics processing would revert to CPU if the GPU is maxed out and so swap might ultimately help? Is there no general GPU-swap mechanism? If CPU threads are competing for GPU resource does the GPU getting paged-out? I suppose this could be an historic thing, GPUs can have a type of DMA now, and disk access is much faster too, so paging perhaps makes sense when it…

The linked post in the original comment at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi... has a lot of details. AMD's GPU do use system memory seamlessly as a fallback, but NVIDIA's don't, at least not back in January 2026. Hundreds of people reported it in their forums too, or variations of the problem.

AMD GPUs use GTT seemlessly under linux. It looks funny in some "top" applications when iGPU that has 512mb allocated to it, uses 8gb of memory: displayed as "uses 8gb out of 0.5gb"

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#266

Post by pezezin »

fluffybucktsnek wrote: post #187
j16sdiz wrote: post #102

It's VRAM, not vRAM.

Out of curiosity, may I ask why?

I don't know, I guess some rule about the capitalization of acronyms. But I have seen it written as VRAM since the early '90s when it meant dual-ported video RAM. I think this is the first time I see it written as vRAM with a lowercase v.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#267

Post by dwattttt »

Twirrim wrote: post #223
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me an old geezer but I remember having this thing called swap.

Right, and when it gets filled, the OOM killer comes along and does its thing.

On some platforms. Others make other arrangements, with other tradeoffs.

It's been less than 24 hours since an OOM killer was identified as responsible for a bug I was experiencing.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#268

Post by LtdJorge »

phiresky wrote: post #213
stillpointlab wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gripe (that I literally crashed out on recently after maining Fedora for the first time) is top of my list for annoyance/frustration with Linux as a desktop. I now have btop permanently running in a Terminal and I habitually Alt-Tab to it to watch my swap. As soon as my free memory gets less than 1 Gb I kill any Firefox tabs (the memory black hole). I know this won't be popular, but Linux people have some kind o…

Which OS are you using? systemd-oomd (or similar) afaik is enabled in many modern releases and fixes it. The default settings (on Arch) make it kill stuff when your CPU is spending 60% of time on reclaiming memory over some time period. So you'll get 20 seconds of lag, then it is fixed. By killing a program, yes, but how else do you expect it to work? If your RAM is not enough you have to kill stuff. And I really dou…

Firefox is definitely more RAM efficient than Chrome, in my experience.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#269

Post by LtdJorge »

hnlmorg wrote: post #256
stillpointlab wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how else do you expect it to work How does it work on Windows and MacOS where I don't get the same freezes and random programs aren't killed by the OS? Because I'd expect it to work like that. There is this false dichotomy, a black and white kind of thinking on display. > And I really doubt you mean to say that Windows is _more RAM efficient_ than Linux What I'm saying ought to be clear to anyone willing to listen.…

I get memory related freezes on macOS all the time. And back when I was forced into running Windows, I used to get memory-related freezes daily. Literally daily. So I’m really not convinced the situation is drastically different there. I mean if it were that simple, Linux would have fixed it already.

Windows makes you miserable when low on RAM. Linux makes you miserable when you get out of RAM.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#270

Post by LtdJorge »

chowells wrote: post #221
phiresky wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which OS are you using? systemd-oomd (or similar) afaik is enabled in many modern releases and fixes it. The default settings (on Arch) make it kill stuff when your CPU is spending 60% of time on reclaiming memory over some time period. So you'll get 20 seconds of lag, then it is fixed. By killing a program, yes, but how else do you expect it to work? If your RAM is not enough you have to kill stuff. And I really dou…

The ideal would be to go into swap without becoming unresponsive, so that the user can quit a program of their choice to free memory. If you really want to make an issue out of it, do something like pre-X macOS, where it would provide a warning when you are getting close to running out of memory, so that a user might have the chance to do something before the current process starts getting swapped out.

Swap is extremely slow. And if running it on a high-end NVMe, you better hope you don't swap often.
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