> SCX-LAVD has been worked on by Linux consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve
It seems like every time I read about this kind of stuff, it's being done by contractors. I think Proton is similar. Of course that makes it no less awesome, but it makes me wonder about the contractor to employee ratio at Valve. Do they pretty much stick to Steam/game development and contract out most of the rest?
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 that Meta's server efficiency is being improved because Valve paid Igalia to make Elden Ring stutter less on a portable Linux PC. This is the best kind of open source trickledown.
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.
I wish valve didn't abandon mac as a platform, honestly. As nice as these improvements are for linux and deck users they have effectively abandoned their mac ports as they never updated them to 64 bit like the linux and windows builds, so they can't run on new macs at all. You can coax them into running with wine on mac but it is a very tricky experience. My kegworks wine wrapper for tf2 is currently broken as of last month because the game update download from wine steam keeps corrupting and I'm at a bit of a loss at this point how to work around it. Even when it was working performance was not great and subject to regular lag spikes whenever too many explosions went off.
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.
> They also needed smoother frame pacing and we got a scheduler that Zuck is now using to run data centers.
There was a lot of work in Linux scheduling space over the years. Con Kolivas BFS was one example. The issue was that Linus had his own ideas about kernel scheduling which, unfortunately, were very different from the ones of the linux community.
And yes. The default linux scheduler sucks.
Blogspam is very disingenuous. Phoronix covers a lot of content in the open source world that isn't well tracked elsewhere, and does some of the best and most comprehensive benchmarking of hardware and software you'll find anywhere on the internet.
It's worth mentioning that sched_ext was developed at Meta. The schedulers are developed by several companies who collaborate to develop them, not just Meta or Valve or Italia and the development is done in a shared GitHub repo - https://github.com/sched-ext/scx.
> Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.
I'm not at all in the know about this, so it would not even occur to me to test it. Is it the case that if you're optimizing Linux performance you'd just try whatever is available?
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.
How well does Linux handle game streaming? I’m just now getting into it, and now that Windows10 is dead, I want to move my desktop PC over to linux, and end my relationship with Microsoft, formally.
Looks like open source helped create Silicon Valley, while no IP laws made Shenzhen. Sharing seems to really drive industry growth, so maybe the US and EU should rethink their IP laws?
I keep being puzzled by the unwillingness of developers to deal with scheduling issues. Many developers avoid optimization, almost all avoid scheduling. There are some pretty interesting algorithms and data structures in that space, and doing it well almost always improves user experience. Often it even decreases total wall-clock time for a given set of tasks.
Something built to shave off latency on a handheld gaming device ends up scaling to hyperscale servers, not because anyone planned it that way, but because the abstraction was done right
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 57.4 ms ] threadIt seems like every time I read about this kind of stuff, it's being done by contractors. I think Proton is similar. Of course that makes it no less awesome, but it makes me wonder about the contractor to employee ratio at Valve. Do they pretty much stick to Steam/game development and contract out most of the rest?
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 that Meta's server efficiency is being improved because Valve paid Igalia to make Elden Ring stutter less on a portable Linux PC. This is the best kind of open source trickledown.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...
There was a lot of work in Linux scheduling space over the years. Con Kolivas BFS was one example. The issue was that Linus had his own ideas about kernel scheduling which, unfortunately, were very different from the ones of the linux community. And yes. The default linux scheduler sucks.
> Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.
I'm not at all in the know about this, so it would not even occur to me to test it. Is it the case that if you're optimizing Linux performance you'd just try whatever is available?