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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

#301

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…

The Linux Desktop people have been singing the song of "works for me" for decades, which is as long as they've been unable to crack double digit users.

Who should do it for you? If anyone wants they can submit a patch for it.

The Linux world is a different kind of beast. I too went through the same motions as many newbies but at some point I just stopped complaining and started fixing what I didn't like.

If you start screaming for corporate money which should fix things that's another can of worms, corporate doesn't really do good will, they are usually buying control whenever they pour money into a project. Which can become tricky for Linux.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#302

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.

[flagged]

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#303
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my laptop 200% fractional scaling of the built-in QHD+ OLED display on KDE Plasma is great, but when I connect my portable 1080p displays or e-paper monitor (UXGA) the fractional scaling of it is not as good as when compared to when the same monitors are used with macOS (M4) in HiDPI mode under lower resolutions. As the other comment says, I suspect it to do with GPU as the built-in displays are usually driven by…

200% isn't fractional scaling, as far as I understand it. Are you using Xorg by any chance? This would explain the issue.

That explains, yeah 200% would be just integer scaling. I'm on Wayland only.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#304

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.

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 not a solution for your use case, but I use earlyoom[0]. When memory crosses a threshold value, it will kill the worst offender. Has some knobs to tweak: what threshold level you want, which programs to keep safe, which to prioritize, etc. Never had to touch the configuration, out of the box has been sufficient for me.

I use it when I am doing exploratory work and might materialize something too big. It has always killed the Python process or terminal program which did something silly.

[0] https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#305

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.

Defaults for swapping and paging unfortunately aren't great. But it's easy to adjust. There's lots of information and fwiw, talking with an LLM I found that they ended up suggesting similar things to what I set for my system (pre LLMs). Of course, don't blindly trust, but it was one thing I did to test them (and expected to be relatively good considering the amount of available information, though hard to sort through, especially for non experts). On the other side, many modern distros are getting better defaults. The difficulty here is that the right values are wrong for most setups and Linux is targeting a much broader range of hardware than windows. Though that's where distros come in

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#306
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mentioned they aren't the only UNIX where this isn't a problem.

Also we cannot use the reasoning Linux means distributions, instead of using GNU/Linux for it, and other times Linux is just the kernel, depending on convenience.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#307
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about Win10 reaching EOL is not being at the mercy of Windows Update any more. It was by far the biggest risk to having a functioning system.

Seriously my spare PC became so much less annoying overnight. It used to not only auto-reboot but also add some fresh non-dismissed nags with every update. Now it's just the nag to install Win11, which, I'd rather eat my entire PC.

You can disable the win11 update nagging inside local group policy editor.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#308
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't had Windows freeze on me for ages. I had a frozen linux server that ran out of RAM yesterday.

> I had a frozen linux server that ran out of RAM yesterday This has so many variables that it's practically useless as a data point. We have a few Ubuntu VMs running complex business web applications and their Postgres database on only 4 GB or RAM and 20-50 GB of storage, no swap space. Ocassional high load, but Zero OOM problems for many years. We could upgrade the RAM, but we were stingy when we created them, and…

True. It's just a tiny Lenovo that I've repurposed as a homelab and that is punching above it's weight with to many applications I suppose. Either way the logs point to RAM issues but it could be my incompetence.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux Desktop people have been singing the song of "works for me" for decades, which is as long as they've been unable to crack double digit users.

Who should do it for you? If anyone wants they can submit a patch for it. The Linux world is a different kind of beast. I too went through the same motions as many newbies but at some point I just stopped complaining and started fixing what I didn't like. If you start screaming for corporate money which should fix things that's another can of worms, corporate doesn't really do good will, they are usually buying contr…

"Works for me and if it doesn't work for you, just fix it." Great, I should learn to become a kernel and device driver developer just to have a working desktop environment with non-tearing windowed video (still somehow an issue)?

What a fucking joke lmao. I'll just keep buying Macs.

> Who should do it for you?

People who want me to use it.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#310
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

such innovation. very wow

Nobody said anything about innovation, the discussion was about whether people look forward to windows updates or not.

People aren't glad for the update. They are only glad to get a feature back that Microsoft was trying to gaslight them into believing they never wanted in the first place.
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