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

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181–190 of 407 posts

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

#181
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RHEL specifically makes it really annoying to see the source. You get a web view.

This violates the GPL, which explicitly states that recipients are entitled to the source tree in a form suitable for modification -- which a web view is not.

it's not the only way they offer the sauce through

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at Microsoft during the Windows 8 cycle. I remember hearing about a kernel feature I found interesting. Then I found linux had it for a few years at the time. I think the reality is that Linux is ahead on a lot of kernel stuff. More experimentation is happening.

Yeah and Linux is waaay behind in other areas. Windows had a secure attention sequence (ctrl-alt-del to login) for several decades now. Linux still doesn't.

Is that something Linux needs? I don’t really understand the benefit of it.

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

#183
post #99

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…

I low key hope the current DDR5 prices push them to drag the Linux memory and swap management into the 21st century, too, because hard locking on low memory got old a while ago

what behavior would you like to see when primary memory is under extreme pressure?

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

#184
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel improvements are interesting to geeks and data centers, but open source is fundamentally incompatible with great user experience. Great UX requires a lot of work that is hard but not algorithmically challenging. It requires consistency and getting many stakeholders to buy in. It requires spending lots of time on things that will never be used by more than 10-20% of people. Windows got a proper graphics composi…

…and you are implying that Microsoft Windows 11 is a better example of ”great user experience”?

If you have anything less than perfect vision and need any accessibility features, yes. If you have a High DPI screen, yes. In many important areas (window management, keyboard shortcuts, etc.), yes.

Here's one top search result that goes into far more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ed0j10/the_state_of...

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

#185

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…

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.

I’ve heard from several people who game on Windows that Gamescope side panel with OS-wide tweakables for overlays, performance, power, frame limiters and scaling is something that they miss after playing on Steam Deck. There are separate utilities for each, but not anything so simple and accessible as in Gamescope.

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

#186
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Microsoft's ACLs are nothing short of one of the best designed permission systems there are. You have a hardened Windows 11 system. A critical application was brought forward from a Windows 10 box but it failed, probably a permissions issue somewhere. Debug it and get it working. You can not try to pass this off to the vendor, it is on you to fix it. Go.

Procmon.exe. Give me 2 minutes. You make it sound like it's such a difficult thing to do. It literally will not take me more than 2 minutes to tell you exactly where the permission issue is and how to fix it.

Procmon won't show you every type of resource access. Even when it does, it won't tell you which entity in the resource chain caused the issue.

And then you get security product who have the fun idea of removing privileges when a program creates a handle (I'm not joking, that's a thing some products do). So when you open a file with write access, and then try to write to the file, you end up with permission errors durig the write (and not the open) and end up debugging for hours on end only to discover that some shitty security product is doing stupid stuff...

Granted, thats not related to ACLs. But for every OK idea microsoft had, they have dozen of terrible ideas that make the whole system horrible.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and Linux is waaay behind in other areas. Windows had a secure attention sequence (ctrl-alt-del to login) for several decades now. Linux still doesn't.

Linux (well, more accurately, X11), has had a SAK for ages now, in the form of the CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE that immediately kills X11, booting you back to the login screen. I personally doubt SAK/SAS is a good security measure anyways. If you've got untrusted programs running on your machine, you're probably already pwn'd.

This setup came from the era of Windows running basically everything as administrator or something close to it.

The whole windows ecosystem had us trained to right click on any Windows 9X/XP program that wasn’t working right and “run as administrator” to get it to work in Vista/7.

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

#188
post #10

> 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 is actually extremely small, I've heard estimates at around 350-400 people. They're also a flat organization, with all the good and bad that brings, so scaling with contractors is easier than bringing on employees that might want to work on something else instead.

300 people isn’t “extremely small” for a company. I don’t work with/for companies over 100 people, for example, and those are already quite big.

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

#189
post #183
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I low key hope the current DDR5 prices push them to drag the Linux memory and swap management into the 21st century, too, because hard locking on low memory got old a while ago

what behavior would you like to see when primary memory is under extreme pressure?

See mac or windows: grow swap automatically up to some sane limit, show a warning, give user an option to kill stuff; on headless systems, kill stuff. Do not page out critical system processes like sshd or the compositor.

A hard lock which requires a reboot or god forbid power cycling is the worst possible outcome, literally anything else which doesn’t start a fire is an improvement TBH.

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

#190
post #71
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleep and hibernate don't just work on Windows unless Microsoft work with laptop and boards manufacturers to make Windows play nice with all those drivers. It's inevitable that it's hit and miss on any other OS that manufacturers don't care much about. Apple does nearly everything inside their walls, that's why it just works.

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)

> its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.

The real problem is that the hardware vendors aren't using its development model. To make this work you either need a) the hardware vendor to write good drivers/firmware, or b) the hardware vendor to publish the source code or sufficient documentation so that someone else can reasonably fix their bugs.

The Linux model is the second one. Which isn't what's happening when a hardware vendor doesn't do either of them. But some of them are better than others, and it's the sort of thing you can look up before you buy something, so this is a situation where you can vote with your wallet.

A lot of this is also the direct fault of Microsoft for pressuring hardware vendors to support "Modern Standby" instead of rather than in addition to S3 suspend, presumably because they're organizationally incapable of making Windows Update work efficiently so they need Modern Standby to paper over it by having it run when the laptop is "asleep" and then they can't have people noticing that S3 is more efficient. But Microsoft's current mission to get everyone to switch to Linux appears to be in full swing now, so we'll see if their efforts on that front manage to improve the situation over time.

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