this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] 0x0@social.rocketsfall.net 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

For those getting excited, It doesn't "boost" gaming performance. It prioritizes the game over the background process (in this case, a kernel being compiled.)

Schedulers aren't magic. As pointed out in the comments of the linked article, there are other ways of doing this. The more interesting tech here is being able to choose between schedulers under specific workloads, which is very nice IMO.

[–] taanegl@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

Schedulers aren't magic, but there are mores ways to skin a cat.

I think process schedulers is a neat and easy compartmentalisation of a concept in itself that adheres to the UNIX philosophy. Hey, if new hardware with new instructions come, that old scheduler might not be the best fit anymore (x86 went big.LITTLE), or say you got a particular workload that works well with a specific scheduler - the latter possibly being a myth.

I've rarely met anyone who didn't stick to their distributions of choice. This is because recompiling the kernels all the time is a pain and crufting up your system with third party repos is just added complexity.

Jokes on you though, that's why I run NixOS. it's all cruft and complexity lol

nix store gc go brr (on schedule of course).

[–] Unyieldingly@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

So it is more or less like changing to -1 or something.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sounds like exactly what you would want for games and interactive apps

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If this is in user space, does this mean we can switch schedulers on the fly? Put it in game mode when gaming, power saving mode when on battery, etc?

[–] 0x0@social.rocketsfall.net 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does a scheduler impact power draw? Maybe you're confusing this for a CPU governor perhaps?

And yes, the underlying tech here is user-configurable schedulers. Very neat.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 7 points 1 year ago

I'm not 100% sure, I just assumed you could affect power use too with different schedulers. Either way, even if that's not the case, being able to change the performance characteristics based on what you want to do on the fly is pretty exciting in its own right.

[–] simple@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wow, that's a huge difference. I wonder if it's just a niche case that fixes Terraria specifically, it would be nice to see more benchmarks on other games.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago

I didn't watch it all. (OK, didn't realize it was only a minute. I basically saw everything).

But I wonder if it's simpler than that, and it's just doing a better job prioritizing the game. Presumably there's a reason they're doing it while running a heavy background process.

This obviously still has value if it's the case, and is a big part of the point of a scheduler, but the headline implied (to me) that it's a general performance improvement, and the video doesn't demonstrate that.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now if only gccrs would mature soon!

LLVM-based is fine for most case, but I bet a lot of people would want to stick with gcc for compiling the kernel.

[–] Giooschi@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For that usecase rustc_codegen_gcc works too and is much more likely to be mature soon.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It seems to still require LLVM, tho

[–] Ullebe1@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

What makes you think that? The whole point of it is to create a rustc backend that uses libgccjit instead of LLVM.