Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out.

Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday!".

Great article! I share the same hunch as the author does; when allocating memory ultimately the application itself is in the best position to inform the kernel about the desired stickiness to VRAM. The best a kernel can do is guessing.

As a side note, it strikes me how much we owe to young trans people for low level performance engineering.

Well written and very informative. I am glad we have these enthusiastic people around for Linux kernel development!

Great article. I find that I learn something every time I read a post about linux kernel work.

I guess an LRU with priority would handle VRAM for games pretty decently without going getting too application specific.

What about VRAM to Disk specifically NVME, would direct to disk be feasible for large workloads, I know it is used for streaming in assets directly via. PCIE, but i wonder how the performance would be on compute workloads running with NVME as a swap for GPU VRAM.

Great writeup, gpuvis looks particularly interesting and glad the kernel is providing tracepoints for performance events.

> Not only does the display hardware like scanned-out images to be in VRAM, it also completely skips past the GPU’s virtual memory architecture and works with physical addresses exclusively.

Well there's your problem. Only so smart your memory management can be when you have to pay the cost of doing it manually. Although presumably this only applies to a small fraction of the VRAM?

I'll be the one to ask the obvious question:

What does this mean for compute workloads? Specifically, LLM inference.

Does it mean anything at all, or is this purely a games-thing?

This is a nice blog and it makes sense to me now. As a gamer and linux user myself, I've previously had to do tweaks and go-arounds without really understanding what was going on behind the scenes. :)

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