AMD + Valve Working On New Linux CPU Performance Scaling Design

[MadCatX]

Just to be fair: schedutil or intel_pstate powersave are bad too vs. Windows balanced profile.

Are they? The last round of benchmarks showed that schedutil has closed the gap on performance and performs just as well in most workloads. Unless the Windows' balanced performs better than Linux' performance, I wouldn't call schedutil bad.

Hopefully this collaborative effort will lead to improvements to the schedulers that we already have instead of something specific for gaming workloads and Zen chips. Anyway, it's awesome to hear that this is finally getting attention.

[skeevy420]

Cool. I hope this'll help my Zen 2 APU...preferably with my 580 because that's my gaming setup.

Not Sure if having Vega or RDNA2, iGPU or dGPU, or DDR4 or 5 matters here. This is one of those Phoronix articles that links back to other Phoronix articles and not to an external source.

[perpetually high]

About time.

So, once again something only happens in Linux when there is a commercial interest. Not before, not after.

You say that like it's a woke statement. More of a captain obvious

Hey, linux is free, and anyone can modify it. You want to gain traction and movement, yeah, you're going have to put money, people, and resources behind it. Who has those? Commercial interest and corporations. So what exactly is your point?

[perpetually high]

This is really exciting. I'm not on the new AMD chips, but eventually I will be.

I'll use the analogy by the creator of the CFS-enhanced with ULE scheduler (CacULE):

"in short, if we imagine that the Linux kernel is a car, then the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) is the engine, CacULE is a hack on throttle system (to make the engine more responsive), and RDB is a turbo."

Scheduler is very important and unless this kind of collaborative effort is happening, we won't see the real performance gains we should be seeing.


EDIT: And on a side note in regards to the GPU scheduler, back when I was mining ethereum on my Polaris GPU, I could mine with Polaris and use my computer and not even know it was doing it.

When I had temporarily switched to the GTX 1080, that was no longer true. The desktop/OS lagged and lagged, was super sluggish. I'm pretty sure it was the GPU scheduler and nVidia had an inferior one than AMD on Linux, and absolutely no one can tell me different because the machine was exactly the same, just GPU swapped out, and all the necessary "were the right drivers/settings configured?"

Point being, if they can get the CPU scheduler down, AMD will have great performance on the CPU and GPU scheduling sides. Of course, I am not an expert or professional, so take everything i'm saying with a slight grain of salt.

[aufkrawall]

Just to be fair: schedutil or intel_pstate powersave are bad too vs. Windows balanced profile.

[intelfx]

About time.

So, once again something only happens in Linux when there is a commercial interest. Not before, not after.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD + Valve Working On New Linux CPU Performance Scaling Design

Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Valve-New-CPU-Freq