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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

#231

Post by cosmic_cheese »

ninth_ant wrote: post #216
iknowstuff wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ubuntu LTS is currently on track to be that. Both in the server and desktop space, in my personal experience it feels like a rising number of commercial apps are targeting that distro specifically. It’s not my distribution of choice, but it’s currently doing exactly what you suggest.

The problem with any LTS release is lack of support for newer hardware. Not as much of an issue for an enthusiast or sysadmin who's likely to be using well-supported hardware, but can be a huge one for a more typical end user hoping to run Linux on their recently purchased laptop.

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

#232

Post by thewebguyd »

embedding-shape wrote: post #160
6r17 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market ; with steam doing all the hard work and having a great market to play with ; the vast distributions to choose from, and most importantly how easy it has become to create an operating system from scratch - they not only lost all possible appeal, they seem stuck on really weird fetichism with their taskbar and just…

> Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market It's a big space. Traditionally, Microsoft has held both the multimedia, gaming and lots of professional segments, but with Valve doing a large push into the two first and Microsoft not even giving it a half-hearted try, it might just be that corporate computers continue using Microsoft, people's home media equip…

I think that's the most likely way it'll go.

Windows will remain as the default "enterprise desktop." It'll effectively become just another piece of business software, like an ERP.

Gamers, devs, enthusiasts will end up on Linux and/or SteamOS via Valve hardware, creatives and personal users that still use a computer instead of their phone or tablet will land in Apple land.

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

#233

Post by senderista »

torginus wrote: post #103
loeg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IOCP is great and was ahead of Linux for decades, but io_uring is also great. It's a different model, not a poor copy.

I think they are a bit different - in the Windows kernel, all IO is asynchronous on the driver level, on Linux, it's not. io_uring didn't change that, it only got rid of the syscall overhead (which is still present on Windows), so in actuality they are two different technical solutions that affect different levels of the stack. In practice, Linux I/O is much faster, owing in part to the fact that Windows file I/O req…

io_uring makes synchronous syscalls async simply by offloading them to a pool of kernel threads, just like people have done for decades in userspace.

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

#234

Post by IshKebab »

ttctciyf wrote: post #196
IshKebab wrote: post #157

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.

Well, there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

That's not the same thing at all.

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

#235

Post by frakkingcylons »

sneak wrote: post #188
tapoxi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a better way to think of it is in terms of revenue per employee. Valve is WAY up there.

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

#236

Post by thewebguyd »

einr wrote: post #161
Arainach wrote: post #159

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”?

For the general user, yes absolutely.

Linux DEs still can't match the accessibility features alone.

yeah, there's layers and layers of progressively older UIs layered around the OS, but most of it makes sense, is laid out sanely, and is relatively consistent with other dialogs.

macOS beats it, but its still better in a lot of ways over the big Linux DEs.

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

#237

Post by m4rtink »

benterix wrote: post #140
dabockster wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah for sure. Linux is amazing in a computer science sense, but it still can't beat Windows' vertically integrated registry/GPO based permissions system. Group/Local Policy especially, since it's effectively a zero coding required system. Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid). I think you can do the same on RHEL too. But that's largely it on Linux right now. If you…

> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid). I think you can do the same on RHEL too. But that's largely it on Linux right now. If you need to admin 10,000+ computers, Windows is still the king. What?! I was doing kickstart on Red Hat (want called Enterprise Linux back then) at my job 25 years ago, I believe we were using floppies for that.

Yeah, I have been working on the RHEL and Fedora installer since 2013 and already back then it had a long history almost lost to time - the git history goes all the way back to 1999 (the history was imported from CVS, as it predates Git) and that actually only cover the first graphical interface - it had automated installation support via kickstart and a text interface long before that, but the commit history has been apparently lost. And there seems to have been even some earlier distict installer before Anaconda, that likely also supported some sort of automated install.

BTW, we managed to get the earlies history of the project written down here by one of the earliest contributors for anyone who might be interested:

https://anaconda-installer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.ht...

As for how the automated installation on RHEL, Fedora and related distros works - it is indeed via kickstart:

https://pykickstart.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Note how some commands were introduced way back in the single digit Fedora/Fedora Core age - that was from about 2003 to 2008. Latest Fedora is Fedora 43. :)

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

#238

Post by dijit »

senderista wrote: post #228
dijit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/...

That argument holds no water. IOUring is essential for the performance of some modern POSIX programs.

You can see shims for fork() to stop tanking performance so hard too. IOUring doesnt map at all onto IOCP, at least the windows subtitute for fork has “ZwCreateProcess“ to work from. IOUring had nothing.

IOCP is much nicer from a dev point of view because your program can be signalled when a buffer has data on it but also with the information of how much data, everything else seems to fail at doing this properly.

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

#239

Post by IshKebab »

dangus wrote: post #182
IshKebab wrote: post #157

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.

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

It's useful for shared spaces like schools, universities and internet cafes. The point is that without it you can display a fake login screen and gather people's passwords.

I actually wrote a fake version of RMNet login when I was in school (before Windows added ctrl-alt-del to login).

https://www.rmusergroup.net/rm-networks/

I got the teacher's password and then got scared and deleted all trace of it.

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

#240

Post by thewebguyd »

jpc0 wrote: post #215
baq wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A hard lock which requires a reboot or god forbid power cycling is the worst possible outcome Hilariously this happens on windows too. Actually everything you said windows and mac doesn't do they do, if you put on a ton a memory pressure the system becomes unresponsive and locks up...

I've OOMd on my mac several times, and it has never gone completely unresponsive.

You get an OOM dialog with a list of apps that you can have it kill.

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