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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

#271

Post by weird-eye-issue »

exceptione wrote: post #90
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have made that observation and pointed it out if they were not trans?

I am inclined to rather point out remarkable things than unremarkable things. There seems to be relatively many trans people in this niche. If I see a soil that is unusually rich in iron, I would be more inclined to point that out. If I come across a piece of soil that is as average as the 98% of the surrounding lands I wouldn't be less likely to point out "hey look, this soil is unremarkable average." Also, it was j…

Man that's such a terrible analogy. In your analogy of course you wouldn't point out the normal soil because it didn't do anything remarkable. But in this case people did do something remarkable (unrelated to their attributes) but it feels like you only pointed out certain attributes about them because they were trans. In fact your analogy is a great illustration of one of the critiques that a lot of people have with the DEI movement because you are saying that you would point out the soil simply for having specific attributes rather than what it actually achieves.

> It is unclear what your problem is exactly, and I am also not sure if a tech forum could provide counsel for that.

So now you are making this personal and trying to say that I have some sort of problem? That's very interesting and I think you might be projecting here a little bit

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#272

Post by LtdJorge »

hnlmorg wrote: post #258
chowells wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Linux already does this. The issue is when your swap is full too, or you’ve exhausted your RAM at such a rapid pace that the disk IO cannot keep up with the read and writes to swap. I’ve seen Windows choke under the same conditions too. > do something like pre-X macOS, where it would…

>> do something like pre-X macOS, where it would provide a warning when you are getting close to running out of memory

And I've run out of memory while compiling packages (I'm looking at you, composable-kernel) on Gentoo. It's not like it can notify me and I close things in the milliseconds it takes for a few more GCC processes to spawn and allocate and fault all the remaining memory.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#273

Post by LtdJorge »

hnlmorg wrote: post #260
frollogaston wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macs will compress infrequently-used memory, and of course everything will swap. So you can have tons of idle tabs that aren't using physical RAM.

That’s not the case with Firefox. I’ve found a few idle YouTube tabs is enough to bring macOS to its knees. Though I do wonder if uBlock Origin is the hidden cause rather than Firefox itself.

YouTube is absolutely atrocious. And it never stops trying to load AD content, even if the user is Premium. So uBlock Origin can sit at 1500 blocked requests in less than an hour.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#274

Post by nchmy »

larksimian wrote: post #201
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…

Just ask any of the last gen coding agents to fix this for you and they'll make a script that tweaks a few things and it just works. Is it acceptable? No. Did it solve my endless crashes that I used to get every day? Yes. I don't love Ubuntu, I just hate modern Windows and find my ubuntu for work popos for gaming setup to be better for me. Ymmv.

why ubuntu for work and (ubuntu-based) popos for gaming? why not popos for both?

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#275

Post by d3Xt3r »

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.

It's not just the kernel, it's also mesa, KDE, pretty much everything really.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#276

Post by Dylan16807 »

Telaneo wrote: post #211
tcdent wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how does literally no one in this thread mention swap? IME, many default installations in recent years don't configure swap by default. Dedicate a few tens-of-gigabytes on your hard drive and memory overflows there instead of borking.

It only postpones the inevitable. It doean't actually fix it. I went for a 64 GB swapfile to hopefully not have to worry about it any more, only to find my swapfile full after a few days anyway, even when configuring swappiness to a minimum. Shit just piles up for no apparent reason. I'm sure someone smarter than me can diagnose the problem, but I just decided to reduce the swapfile size to a more sensible value and…

It's not inevitable for most use cases.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#277

Post by deepsun »

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…

Linux can, and does, prevent a program to claim any new memory. Like literally malloc() returns null. How program reacts to that is up to the program.

Also I know linux has `cgroup_enable=memory` setting in /etc/default/grub, that's for Docker/K8S to be able to watch over containers RAM. It's not enabled by default as it slows down OS a little. Don't know if it's related to my first point.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#278

Post by Dylan16807 »

frollogaston wrote: post #176
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.

Just last night I was debugging some batch job on a Linux box making the machine go unresponsive even though there's no swap . User process taking all the RAM and the OOM killer doesn't stop it, instead the killer itself gets live-locked along with the ssh session or whatever else, so I can't just get in to look at it.

> even though there's no swap

When your OOM killer isn't aggressive enough, not having swap makes you go fully unresponsive sooner. You still get into a situation where the OS keeps having to purge pages and read them again from disk. But without swap one hand is tied behind its back and it can only purge code pages, not data pages.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#279

Post by burnte »

bsimpson wrote: post #235

I have a Z1 Extreme that has 16GB shared between the CPU and GPU (what AMD calls the APU). I've noticed that mangohud, the SteamOS utility that shows performance diagnostics, often reports RAM + VRAM numbers that exceed 16GB. I've been curious as to why. I presume it has to do with compression or something.

I would assume virtual memory.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#280

Post by burnte »

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

It's VRAM, not vRAM.

Out of curiosity, may I ask why?

Generally in our IT jargon writing "vRAM" would mean some sort of virtualized RAM thing, while VRAM shows the V is part of the initialism and thus VIDEO RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY. Nothing formal, just informal usage.
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