Feral's GameMode 1.1 Released For Optimizing Linux Gaming Performance

One month ago Linux game porter Feral Interactive introduced GameMode as a utility/service for dynamically optimizing the Linux system performance when running games. The initial focus on GameMode was on ensuring the CPU scaling governor was in its performance mode while today brought the GameMode v1.1 release.

In the month since publicly unveiling GameMode, there has been dozens of commits going into this tool to "optimize Linux system performance on demand" though at the moment still largely remains focused on setting the Intel/AMD CPU frequency scaling driver's governor. But a lot of infrastructure work is now laid so hopefully soon we will see GameMode expand to offer more performance tweaks/optimizations.

Among the changes to find with Friday's GameMode 1.1 release is support for cascaded configuration files, -r and -s arguments for the GameMode daemon for the request and status, support for user-defined script plug-ins within the configuration file, support for a user-defined reaper thread frequency, systemd status message support, various scripting improvements, and other code refactoring and fixes.

It's certainly not the most compelling release right now or much of a reason to use it if you are already forcing the "performance" governor on your system, but with more of the infrastructure work being laid, it will be interesting to see what other optimizations and performance tweaks they pick up moving forward for enhancing the Linux gaming performance.

Those wanting to fetch the GameMode 1.1 code can do so via GitHub.