Feral's GameMode Gets Patches To Adjust I/O Priority For Games

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Feral's GameMode Gets Patches To Adjust I/O Priority For Games

Feral's GameMode open-source project for dynamically optimizing a Linux system for gaming with automatically adjusting tunables like the CPU frequency scaling governor and real-time kernel optimizations may soon see another feature added...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GameMode-IO-Priorities

[cl333r]

I'm using Linux for 10 years and this is my #1 issue with Linux: priority hell.
When I do I/O even simple desktop tasks like graphics sometimes get jittery or some other non I/O bound stuff. Yeah there's been effort to fix this and even claims to have fixed it but it's still there, maybe not as outrageous as before, nobody knows where's the real problem in the kernel (afaik not an issue on SSD).
And internet traffic is a mess - when on Linux I download a torrent it stalls all my non-torrent traffic, when on windows on same computer when I download a torrent at full speed I can also browse the internet - the OS somehow balances the traffic. I'm sick and tired having to set the torrent download speed manually to be able to also browse stuff.

[boxie]

I'm using Linux for 10 years and this is my #1 issue with Linux: priority hell.
When I do I/O even simple desktop tasks like graphics sometimes get jittery or some other non I/O bound stuff. Yeah there's been effort to fix this and even claims to have fixed it but it's still there, maybe not as outrageous as before, nobody knows where's the real problem in the kernel (afaik not an issue on SSD).
And internet traffic is a mess - when on Linux I download a torrent it stalls all my non-torrent traffic, when on windows on same computer when I download a torrent at full speed I can also browse the internet - the OS somehow balances the traffic. I'm sick and tired having to set the torrent download speed manually to be able to also browse stuff.

Have you eliminated your router as the problem with torrents? Lots routers fall over with the many connections a torrent client might open. If you have your clients configured differently that *might* be the cause.

[pal666]

I'm using Linux for 10 years and this is my #1 issue with Linux: priority hell.

time to buy ssd

.
And internet traffic is a mess - when on Linux I download a torrent it stalls all my non-torrent traffic, when on windows on same computer when I download a torrent at full speed I can also browse the internet - the OS somehow balances the traffic.

os can't balance inbound traffic. maybe your windows torrent client is just slow?

[SpyroRyder]

time to buy ssd

The answer to inefficient IO shouldn't just be "buy a faster device". We should be working at fixing such issues.

[pal666]

The answer to inefficient IO shouldn't just be "buy a faster device". We should be working at fixing such issues.

you can't fix hdd. it is actually great tragedy of computing. size of hdds grew exponentially while speeds didn't. so task "read full hdd" turned from taking seconds to days. and when you read non-sequentially, it can easily become months. well, you can twiddle with io schedulers and priorities, but you can't get several orders of magnitude improvement, which is required.
keep you torrents on hdd, keep small and often accessed files on ssd

[Beherit]

I'm using Linux for 10 years and this is my #1 issue with Linux: priority hell.
When I do I/O even simple desktop tasks like graphics sometimes get jittery or some other non I/O bound stuff. Yeah there's been effort to fix this and even claims to have fixed it but it's still there, maybe not as outrageous as before, nobody knows where's the real problem in the kernel (afaik not an issue on SSD).
And internet traffic is a mess - when on Linux I download a torrent it stalls all my non-torrent traffic, when on windows on same computer when I download a torrent at full speed I can also browse the internet - the OS somehow balances the traffic. I'm sick and tired having to set the torrent download speed manually to be able to also browse stuff.

Weird. When I saturate my 1 gbit connection I have the exact opposite experience of Linux vs Windows. And this is on my ancient Core2Duo Q9550 desktop computer, which is almost 10 years old now.

Using Windows it was mandatory for me to shut down and disable everything else before starting any game, otherwise I'd get loads of micro stuttering and lag. With Linux I can have all sorts of servers running whilst gaming.

Admittedly, it required some changes of the vm.swapiness/ratio/pressure variables to fine tune it. But that's more an issue of limited RAM than any "priority hell".

[untore]

If you have io problems on linux you can:
Tweak your current fs (atime cache compression etc)
Switch fs (zfs)
use raid
Put cake both on host nic and router nic
check what what gets offloaded to your nic and what to your cpu (ethtool)
Try a custom kernel (i use xanmod)

[DMJC]

Anyone figured out the new Feral releases? There's supposed to be another two games in the pipeline.

[randomsalad]

The answer to inefficient IO shouldn't just be "buy a faster device". We should be working at fixing such issues.

this
Mitigating potential bottlenecks in the pipeline by adjusting OS behavior is all fine and dandy until you reach a point where software code becomes so inefficient it can't run on any OS that don't have these per-software optimizations.

If it's an optimization that benefits everything without drawbacks, it should be folded into the base OS. If it only benefits a very few select pieces of software, those software should be fixed instead.