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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

#391

Post by graynk »

trinsic2 wrote: post #382
graynk wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is just willingly turning a blind eye. it's not about the reputation or being a "good company", it's about the facts of what they do.

I'm choosing not to place the blame on them as I don't see it as something they can control. And I trust Valve to do the right thing over most any large game studio out there. The history of reputation and actions matter. I think you want to to try and skew the narrative based on you own particular bias. The situation is much bigger than what you are making it out to be.

> I think you want to to try and skew the narrative based on you own particular bias.

This is exactly what you are doing.

> The history of reputation and actions matter.

The history of actions matter, yes. The history of actions on the gambling topic has been very consistent thus far from Valve.

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

#392

Post by johnny22 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #255
johnny22 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't erase all the groundwork they've done over the years to make it possible for these later enhancements to happen. It wasn't like they were twiddling their thumbs this whole time!

That's not my intention at all. It's just frustrating how little of it translates to impact that's readily felt by end users, including those of us without technical inclination.

It did and was, it was just something that built up over time as more and paper cuts and small things got fixed. So even if it didn't feel like things were changing, they were.

I've been "gaming" on linux for a long time, and you could see the slow march of progress as more and more stuff worked, and more and more stuff got faster.

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

#393

Post by Plagman »

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…

The Elden Ring stutter work was unrelated to this effort, it was work in vkd3d-proton by Hans-Kristian Arntzen as part of our open-source graphics effort.

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

#394

Post by pityJuke »

trinsic2 wrote: post #382
graynk wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is just willingly turning a blind eye. it's not about the reputation or being a "good company", it's about the facts of what they do.

I'm choosing not to place the blame on them as I don't see it as something they can control. And I trust Valve to do the right thing over most any large game studio out there. The history of reputation and actions matter. I think you want to to try and skew the narrative based on you own particular bias. The situation is much bigger than what you are making it out to be.

What do you mean they can’t control it? They could stop gambling tomorrow by disabling trading and disabling case openings. Valve already appear to be preparing for the latter to happen via regulation with the “Armory” feature in CS, which follows Fortnite & other major AAA titles.

(Oh, talking about Valve electing to engage in scummy behaviour, the “X-ray” feature is a classic example of them deliberately subverting regulation against loot boxes.)

If you want to bring up the “let the free market be the free market” angle, I’d at least be amenable to it.

But pretending as if they’re innocent passengers, and that they have no idea what is going on it ludicrous. Don’t baby a billion dollar company.

(I have skin the game too. If Valve blocked trading, I’d lose $400 worth of value in my skins. I’d still rather not support gambling, especially the type that is so incredibly unregulated.)

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

#395

Post by roblabla »

lmz wrote: post #376
roblabla wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Procmon won't show you every type of resource access. Even when it does, it won't tell you which entity in the resource chain caused the issue. And then you get security product who have the fun idea of removing privileges when a program creates a handle (I'm not joking, that's a thing some products do). So when you open a file with write access, and then try to write to the file, you end up with permission errors du…

Shitty security products being inscrutable isn't limited to Windows. "Disable SELinux" anyone?

While that's true, linux _tends_ to follow the rules a bit better, and not change how APIs work from under your feets. For instance on Linux, permission checks are done when you open a handle. An LSM like SELinux can only allow or deny your rights to open the handle at the permission level you requested, that's it. It cannot allow the handle to be opened, but with less privileges than requested, nor can it do permission check at operation time. So once your open is successful, you can be pretty sure that you've cleared the permission checks bar, and are good to go.

This makes writing robust code under those systems a lot easier, which in turns makes debugging things when it goes wrong nicer. Now, I'm not going to say debugging those systems is great - SELinux errors are still an inscrutable mess and writing SELinux policy is fairly painful.

But there is real value in limiting where errors can crop up, and how they can happen.

Of course, there is stuff like FUSE that can throw a wrench into this: instead of an LSM, a linux security product could write their own FS overlay to do these kind of shenanigans. But those seem to be extremely rare on Linux, whereas they're very commonplace on Windows - mostly because MS doesn't provide the necessary tools to properly write security modules, so everyone's just winging it.

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

#396

Post by ninth_ant »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #231
ninth_ant wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Canonical has demonstrated a willingness to work with vendors to get their software preinstalled or supported.

So they already are the major player in this game and will have a leg up on others trying to enter the same space.

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

#398

Post by wredcoll »

ndriscoll wrote: post #117
dabockster wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a part of Secure Boot, which Linux people have raged against for a long time. Mostly because the main key signing authority was Microsoft. But here's my rub: no one else bothered to step up to be a key signer. Everyone has instead whined for 15 years and told people to disable Secure Boot and the loads of trusted compute tech that depends on it, instead of actually building and running the necessary infra for…

The goals of the people mandating Secure Boot are completely opposed to the goals of people who want to decide what software they run on the computer they own. Literally the entire point of remote attestation is to take that choice away from you (e.g. because they don't want you to choose to run cheating software). It's not a matter of "no one stepped up"; it's that Epic Games isn't going to trust my secure boot key…

Is there any even theoretically viable way to prevent cheats from accessing a game you're running on a local machine without also disabling full user control of your system?

I suppose something like a "reboot into '''secure''' mode" to enable the anti-cheat and stuff, or maybe we'll just get steamplay or whatever where literally the entire game runs remote and streams video frames to the user.

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

#399

Post by wredcoll »

johnny22 wrote: post #392
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my intention at all. It's just frustrating how little of it translates to impact that's readily felt by end users, including those of us without technical inclination.

It did and was, it was just something that built up over time as more and paper cuts and small things got fixed. So even if it didn't feel like things were changing, they were. I've been "gaming" on linux for a long time, and you could see the slow march of progress as more and more stuff worked, and more and more stuff got faster.

This is a good point, the fact that you can just download some video games and run them on your linux desktop with a working desktop environment and so on, even while getting a ton of papercuts, was basically unimaginable 15 years ago.

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

#400

Post by bongodongobob »

Anon1096 wrote: post #311
bongodongobob wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you prematurely dump hardware you already own when you see CPU usage go down? I don't think so.

What you're missing is that for these massive systems there's never enough capacity. You can go look at datacenter buildouts YOY if you'd like. Any and all compute power that can be used is being used. For individual services what that means is that for something like Google Search there will be dozens of projects in the hopper that aren't being worked on because there's just not enough hardware to supply the feature…

I've never in my life (25 years in the business) seen a system that was so utilized things needed to be cut. Every single cluster/DC I've worked with has been at 50-85% utilization tops. I mean, they might hit 100% during a report generation period or something, but the 95% avg I've seen has never exceeded maybe 80%.
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