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

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

#221

Post by singron »

iknowstuff wrote: post #205
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would've expected one of the many desktop-oriented distros (some with considerable funding, even) to have tackled these things already, but somehow desktop Linux has been stuck in the awkward midway of "it technically works, just learn to live with the rough edges" until finally Valve took initiative. Go figure.

There's far more of that, starting with the lack of a stable ABI in gnu/linux distros. Eventually Valve or Google (with Android) are gonna swoop in with a user-friendly, targetable by devs OS that's actually a single platform

Isn't that the steam linux runtime? Games linked against the runtime many years ago still run on modern distros.

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

#222

Post by butlike »

chucky_z wrote: post #25
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?

This isn’t explicitly called out in any of the other comments in my opinion so I’ll state this. Valve as a company is incredibly focused internally on its business. Its business is games, game hardware, and game delivery. For anything outside of that purview instead of trying to build a huge internal team they contract out. I’m genuinely curious why other companies don’t do this style more often because it seems incr…

Small company doesn't have the capital to contract out library work like that. Same story as it's always been

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

#223

Post by wocram »

bogwog wrote: post #110
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…

There are numerous other ways to publish games. Is it really rent-seeking to own and maintain the most popular game publishing platform?

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

#224

Post by aucisson_masque »

Sparkyte wrote: post #171

I've been using Bazzite Desktop for 4 months now and it has been my everything. Windows is just abandonware now even with every update they push. It is clunky and hard to manage.

Isn't bazzite a gaming focused distribution ? It seems weird to install it on a PC that does 'my everything'.

I wouldn't make excel spreadsheet on the steam deck for instance.

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

#225

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

butlike wrote: post #219
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Igalia is a bit unique as it serves as a single corporate entity for organizing a lot of sponsored work on the Linux kernel and open source projects. You'll notice in their blog posts they have collaborations with a number of other large companies seeking to sponsor very specific development work. For example, Google works with them a lot. I think it really just simplifies a lot of logistics for paying folks to do th…

Oh ok, so Igalia owns the developer sweatshops now. Got it.

It's a cooperative sweatshop in that sense.

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

#226

Post by thewebguyd »

ethbr1 wrote: post #199
dangus wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The more powerful form is the UAC full privilege escalation dance that Win 7+(?) does, which is a surprisingly elegant UX solution. 1. Snapshot the desktop 2. Switch to a separate secure UI session 3. Display the snapshot in the background, greyed out, with the UAC prompt running in the current session and topmost It avoids any chance of a user-space program faking or interacting with a UAC window. Clever way of deal…

One of the things Windows did right, IMO. I hate that elevation prompts on macOS and most linux desktops are indistinguishable from any other window.

It's not just visual either. The secure desktop is in protected memory, and no other process can access it. Only NTAUTHORITY\System can initiate showing it and interact with it any way, no other process can.

You can also configure it to require you to press CTRL+ALT+DEL on the UAC prompt to be able to interact with it and enter credentials as another safeguard against spoofing.

I'm not even sure if Wayland supports doing something like that.

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

#227

Post by jact »

dabockster wrote: post #108
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.

Can it vanish behind proprietary licensing? Pretty sure most of Valve’s stuff is under GPL so they can’t exactly evaporate that away.

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

#228

Post by senderista »

dijit wrote: post #48
asveikau wrote: post #38

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

If that were true then presumably Microsoft wouldn't have ported it to Windows:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...

Although Windows registered network I/O (RIO) came before io_uring and for all I know might have been an inspiration:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

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

#229

Post by nextaccountic »

dymk wrote: post #131
dabockster wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They have to abide by the Wine license, which is basically GPL, so unless they’re going to make their own from scratch, they can’t make the bread and butter of their compat layer proprietary

That's why the anti-GPL push is so harmful. Specially in the Rust ecosystem

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

#230

Post by jraph »

tayo42 wrote: post #211
esseph wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean immutable?

That wasn't what I was thinking about. There's a phrase for it using active and back up partitions but I can't find what it's called

A/B updates?
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