Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve's Steam Deck On Its Servers

10 months ago by cm0002 to c/linux

An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.

SCX-LAVD as the Latency-criticality Aware Virtual Deadline scheduler has worked out very well for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck with similar or better performance than EEVDF. SCX-LAVD has been worked on by Linux consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve. SCX-LAVD has also seen varying use by the CachyOS Handheld Edition, Bazzite, and other Linux gaming software initiatives.

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s08nlql9 5 points 10 months ago

Need to research what a scheduler means but all can think of is something like cron

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towerful 45 points 10 months ago

In my experience, a Scheduler is something that schedules time on the CPU for processes (threads).

So 10 processes (threads) say "I need to do something":
2 of those threads are "ready to continue" because they were previously waiting on some Disk IO (and responsibly released thread control while data was fetched).
1 of the threads says "this is critical for GPU operations".
1 of those threads self declares it is elevated priority.

The scheduler decides which of those threads actually gets time on an available CPU core to be processed.

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