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

phoronix.com

341–350 of 407 posts

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

#341
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course smaller companies exist — there are 1 person companies! But in a world where many tech companies have 50,000+ employees, 300 is much closer to 100 or 10 and they can all be considered small. And then you consider it in context: a company with huge impact, brand recognition, and revenue (about $50M/employee in 2025). They’ve remained extremely small compared to how big they could grow.

> many tech companies have 50,000+ employees There are not many tech companies with 50k+ employees, as a point of fact. I’m not arguing just to argue - 300 people isn’t small by any measure. It’s absolutely not “extremely small” as was claimed. It’s not relatively small, it’s not “small for what they are doing”, it’s just not small at all. 300 people is a large company. The fact that a very small number of ultrahuge…

Would you say a country of 300 people isn't small?

Big, small, etc. are relative terms. There is no way to decide whether or not 300 is small without implicitly saying what it's small relative to. In context, it was obvious that the point being made was "valve is too small to have direct employees working on things other than the core business"

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

#342
post #254
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us can! I certainly enjoy doing it, and according to "man 5 acl" what you assert is completely false. Unless you have a particular commit or document from kernel.org you had in mind?

> Each of these characters is replaced by the - character to denote that a permission is absent in the ACL entry. Wouldn't the o::--- default ACL, like mode o-rwx, deny others access in the way you're describing?

See 6.2.1 of RFC8881, where NFSv4 ACLs are described. They are quite similar to Windows ACLs.

Here is kernel dev telling they are against adding NFSv4 ACL implementation. The relevant RichAcls patch never got merged: https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/3/15/52

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Mac user, but I recently played around with a beefy laptop at work to see how games ran on it, and I was shocked at how bad and user-hostile Windows 11 is. I had previously used Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, but 11 is just so janky. It's feestoned with Co-pilot/AI jank, and seems to be filled with ads and spyware. If I didn't know better, I'd assume Windows was a free, ad-supported product. If I ever pick…

In defence of Windows . . . (I've been a cross platform numerical developer in GIS and geophysics for decades) serious windows power users, current and former windows developers and engineers, swear by Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility . It's an open powershell suite collaboration by hundreds maintained by an opinionated coordinater that allows easy installation of common tools, easy setting of update behaviours, ea…

Bazzite is nice but its not very CLI centric I think because of the immutability. Its a great OS, but I found Cachy a lot better if you want to work from CLI in normal ways

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

#344
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes please! Stop making me download 100+gb patches!

The large file sizes are not because of bloat per-se... It's a technique which supposedly helped at one point in time to reduce loading times, helldiver's being the most note-able example of removing this "optimization". However, this is by design - specifically as an optimization. Can't really be calling that boat in the parents context of inefficient resource usage

Do you have some resource for people outside this field to understand what it's about?

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

#345

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…

Game development is STILL a highly underrated field. Plenty of advancements/optimizations (both in software/hardware) can be directly traced back to game development. Hopefully, with RAM prices shooting up the way it is, we go back to keeping optimizations front and center and reduce all the bloat that has accumulated industry wide.

A number of my tricks are stolen from game devs and applied to boring software. Most notably, resource budgets for each task. You can’t make a whole system fast if you’re spending 20% of your reasonable execution time on one moderately useful aspect of the overall operation.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling this will also drag Linux mobile forwards. Currently almost no one is using Linux for mobile because the lack or apps (banking for example) and bad hardware support. When developing for Linux becomes more and more attractive this might change.

> When developing for Linux becomes more and more attractive this might change. If one (or maybe two) OSes win, then sure. The problem is there is no "develop for Linux" unless you are writing for the kernel. Each distro is a standalone OS. It can have any variety of userland. You don't develop "for Linux" so much as you develop "for Ubuntu" or "for Fedora" or "for Android" etc.

This is addressed (imperfectly) by Flatpak

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Start menu in the middle of the screen that takes a couple seconds to even load (because it is implemented in React horribly enought to be this slow) only to show adds next to everything is perfect user experience. Every other button triggering Copilots assures even better UX goodness.

You can move the menu to left and disable the animations so it opens instantly.

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

#348

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.

I think you’ve forgotten or aren’t aware that before 3d graphics cards took over, people would buy new video cards to ostensibly make excel faster but then use them to play video games. It was an interesting time with interesting justifications for buying upgrades.

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

#349
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The large file sizes are not because of bloat per-se... It's a technique which supposedly helped at one point in time to reduce loading times, helldiver's being the most note-able example of removing this "optimization". However, this is by design - specifically as an optimization. Can't really be calling that boat in the parents context of inefficient resource usage

We aren't talking about the initial downloads though. We are talking about updates. I am like 80% sure you should be able to send what changed without sending the whole game as if you were downloading it for the first time.

Helldiver's engine does have that capability, where bundle patches only include modified files and markers for deleted files. However, the problem with that, and likely the reason Arrowhead doesn't use it, is the lack of a process on the target device to stitch them together. Instead, patch files just sit next to the original file. So the trade-off for smaller downloads is a continuously increasing size on disk.

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

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a SAK, you can disable it with setxkbmap. A SAK is on purpose impossible to disable, and it exists on Linux: Alt+SysRq+K. Unfortunately it doesn't take any display server into consideration, both X11 and Wayland will just get killed.

There are many a ways to disable CTRL+ALT+DEL on windows too, from registry tricks to group policy options. Overall, SAK seems to be a relic of the past that should be kept far away from any security consideration.

There shouldn't be any non-privileged ways to disable ctrl-alt-del.
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