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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

#281

Post by teravor »

mkesper wrote: post #229
teravor wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zram can create a very good buffer for that sort of thing

Better use zswap, as zram and swap together can lead to priority inversion. https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-... (found via lwn.net)

it depends on what you want to do. in my case I only want disk swap to be used for hibernation. I calibrated the system to make do with the very generous zram compression ratio of 3 and if it doesn't work out a userspace OOM killer will fix it. zswap will be polluting your SSD all the time.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#282

Post by Dylan16807 »

yayachiken wrote: post #224
akdev1l wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux can be configured to disable memory overcommit sysctl -w vm.overcommit_memory=2 sysctl -w vm.overcommit_ratio=50 It is probably a bad idea to do that though as it will limit the amount of virtual address space an application can use

Note that the fork()/execve() semantics of Linux pretty much depend on memory overcommit. You may get weird OOM crashes when there is seemingly no memory pressure, if you turn overcommit off. In the short time between fork() and execve(), the new process duplicates the entire virtual memory of the old one. None of this is physically allocated due to copy-on-write, but still all counts as virtual memory.

Has anybody tried a compromise? Like, the program forks and overcommit is ignored for it for a 1 second grace period? I know it would be more complicated than that, but something along those general lines.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#283

Post by pbhjpbhj »

zahlman wrote: post #194
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got to be an edge case for Wayland to be used with a 2GB VRAM card? Targeting recent cards and letting people using older hardware install x-windows, or whatever, seems sensible. You say (in your blog post) "Linux" didn't work well so you reverted to "Windows", but as is so often the case you buried the distro/version info. You don't seem to have been using Win11 (later you mention Win7 & Win10Pro) ... So it's c…

> It's got to be an edge case for Wayland to be used with a 2GB VRAM card? I had thought that one of the biggest "selling" points of Linux is the ability to extend the useful lifetime of older hardware. And if the distros are going to turn away from X11, well.

Yes, it has been a selling point that Linux can revive old hardware. It still is. But when a whole new desktop rendering system is implemented, just hitting the mainstream in the last year or so (for me on [K]Ubuntu) then I think you should expect backwards support of a 12 year old system to be limited. That's kinda my bugbear, they say (paraphrasing) 'linux didn't work' but they're comparing older Windows systems with newer Linux systems. Yes, ultimately the story was positive for Linux, but there's an inherent bias IMO where Linux is put down if it doesn't do everything better than every version of Windows for every piece of hardware. If you're using the very latest hardware, or older hardware, you're going to have to get your hand dirty choosing a distro or configuring an install (or possibly compiling drivers).

Win11 wouldn't work on 2 year old hardware (no compatible TPM was the complaint, but I worked around it with hacks that MS didn't publicise). I should probably have used that as a chance to move that family member to a friendly Linux distro ...

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#284

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nickjj wrote: post #139
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain a little more please. I thought that graphics processing would revert to CPU if the GPU is maxed out and so swap might ultimately help? Is there no general GPU-swap mechanism? If CPU threads are competing for GPU resource does the GPU getting paged-out? I suppose this could be an historic thing, GPUs can have a type of DMA now, and disk access is much faster too, so paging perhaps makes sense when it…

The linked post in the original comment at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi... has a lot of details. AMD's GPU do use system memory seamlessly as a fallback, but NVIDIA's don't, at least not back in January 2026. Hundreds of people reported it in their forums too, or variations of the problem.

Thanks, I'll give it a read.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#285

Post by zamadatix »

dessimus wrote: post #168
Beijinger wrote: post #116

You know what I would like to have? An application that sends a kill / kill -9 signal to a specific app, example Chromes, when things go south.

How is that sufficiently different from the Halting Problem?

The halting problem asks you to conclusively answer if a arbitrary program will stop running in the future. This asks to stop running a given program when stats seem bad currently. I don't really see what the relation is supposed to be.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#286

Post by frollogaston »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #278
frollogaston wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I figured in the end that's what was happening

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#287

Post by goodmythical »

alt227 wrote: post #44
d3Xt3r wrote: post #11

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out. Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday…

I personally am very excited for the upcoming Windows 11 update which will allow users to move the taskbar to any edge of their screen.

Wait, when did they take that away?

I haven't touched MS in this decade, but I swear that used to be a thing at least through 7...

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#288

Post by jamesfinlayson »

hnlmorg wrote: post #256
stillpointlab wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how else do you expect it to work How does it work on Windows and MacOS where I don't get the same freezes and random programs aren't killed by the OS? Because I'd expect it to work like that. There is this false dichotomy, a black and white kind of thinking on display. > And I really doubt you mean to say that Windows is _more RAM efficient_ than Linux What I'm saying ought to be clear to anyone willing to listen.…

I get memory related freezes on macOS all the time. And back when I was forced into running Windows, I used to get memory-related freezes daily. Literally daily. So I’m really not convinced the situation is drastically different there. I mean if it were that simple, Linux would have fixed it already.

Yeah I got MacOS freezes sometimes - never checked Activity Monitor to see why though.

On Windows it's usually the hard drive being over-used that makes things drag for me.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#289

Post by nomel »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #215
phiresky wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Call me an old geezer but I remember having this thing called swap.

Yeah, I'm super confused. Is the 34 year old solution to this (swap) somehow broken these days?

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#290

Post by inventor7777 »

LoganDark wrote: post #249
inventor7777 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to hear that. But my GLM5.2 is not 8TB, it is only around 200GB and works pretty well. (0.9tok/sec from a 40Gbps NVMe) I used https://huggingface.co/anemll/GLM-5.2-sidecar

Huh? I have 8TB of data I'd have to back up in order to downgrade macOS. You can't downgrade in-place.

Oh, I'm sorry. When you said "I don't have the spare 8TB" I assumed you were talking about GLM.

Also, it's very rare for people to have the 8TB option on Macs - it's got to be a $1600+ option, huh? So not very common, which is why I assumed it meant something else.

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