Description
The Gaming on Linux Microconference welcomes the community to discuss a broad range of topics around improvements for Gaming devices running Linux. Gaming on Linux has pushed the kernel to improve in several areas and has helped create new features for Linux, such as the futex_waitv() syscall, the Unicode subsystem, HDR support, sched_ext, and much more. Although some of these were initially created for gaming use cases, they now have more generalized use.
The potential topics for this year are around a lot of subsystems in the kernel, including:
- Tracking workchain-granularity deadline detection in sched_ext for improved latency and frame rates
- The current state of upstreaming a GPU cgroup controller
- Using the cgroup v2 MM controller to manage GPU-mapped DRAM
- Autonomous kernel-level performance monitoring and improvement for gaming on Linux workloads
- Resource management on gaming devices using Orchestrator
- Improvements in debug data collection
- Current challenges in standardized benchmarking of gaming on Linux
- Distro support for Gaming on Linux
Last year was the first edition of the Gaming on Linux MC, and the focus was fairly broad across various parties and subsystems in the kernel. Since last year, Linux has continued to increase its footprint in the global market share of gaming platforms. Thanks to advancements in the kernel and the larger ecosystem in e.g. Valve Proton, the vast majority of games now run on Linux at equal parity to Windows, or better.
As this MC continues to mature and find its rhythm, we hope to emphasize this year's discussions on concrete problems in the kernel and surrounding ecosystems that need to be addressed to enable Linux to become the preeminent gaming platform.
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Daniel Almeida (Collabora), Philipp Stanner
The Linux kernel is responsible for managing the dependency graph of userspace's compute and graphics shaders. Moreover, it handles the GPU load balancing and tries to guarantee forward progress and deadlock resistance.
Historically, most graphics drivers have used drm_sched, a problematic legacy code base, for these tasks. More recently, Rust drivers are ramping up their own infrastructure...
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Srinivas Pandruvada
Gaming performance remains critical for user experience, but power efficiency has become equally important, particularly for battery-powered devices. Also improves thermal management and reduce thermal throttling. LPMD offers a solution for enhancing energy efficiency by dynamically selecting optimal processor configurations and power slider settings based on CPU and GPU utilization.
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This... -
David Vernet (Meta)
I've observed that on the Steam Deck, changes to the AMD p-state driver can have a significant impact on tail latencies and stale frame numbers. I've submitted an RFC upstream which proposes a per-CPU EPP boost heuristic: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260728073150.54964-1-void@manifault.com/.
We should discuss gaps in the current cpufreq / AMD p-state driver, and how to best address...
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