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Kernel and Graphics: Vulkan, NVIDIA Memory Compaction and Intel DRM Driver

Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux
  • vkBasalt CAS Vulkan Layer Adds FXAA Support

    The open-source vkBasalt project is the independent effort implementing AMD Radeon Image Sharpening / Contrast Adaptive Sharpening technique as a Vulkan post-processing layer that can be used regardless of the (Vulkan-powered) game. With vkBasalt 0.1 also now comes the ability to apply FXAA.

    Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) is the latest feature of vkBasalt besides the contrast adaptive sharpening. However, for the v0.1 release, CAS and FXAA cannot both be enabled at the same time. It's on the project TODO list for being able to enable both FXAA and CAS in a future release. Like the existing CAS support, the anti-aliasing technique can be used for any Vulkan game thanks to this being implemented as a post-processing layer for this graphics API.

  • mm: Proactive compaction
    For some applications we need to allocate almost all memory as
    hugepages. However, on a running system, higher order allocations can
    fail if the memory is fragmented. Linux kernel currently does on-demand
    compaction as we request more hugepages but this style of compaction
    incurs very high latency. Experiments with one-time full memory
    compaction (followed by hugepage allocations) shows that kernel is able
    to restore a highly fragmented memory state to a fairly compacted memory
    state within <1 sec for a 32G system. Such data suggests that a more
    proactive compaction can help us allocate a large fraction of memory as
    hugepages keeping allocation latencies low.
    
    For a more proactive compaction, the approach taken here is to define
    per page-node tunable called ‘hpage_compaction_effort’ which dictates
    bounds for external fragmentation for HPAGE_PMD_ORDER pages which
    kcompactd should try to maintain.
    
    The tunable is exposed through sysfs:
      /sys/kernel/mm/compaction/node-n/hpage_compaction_effort
    
    The value of this tunable is used to determine low and high thresholds
    for external fragmentation wrt HPAGE_PMD_ORDER order.
    
    Note that previous version of this patch [1] was found to introduce too
    many tunables (per-order, extfrag_{low, high}) but this one reduces them
    to just (per-node, hpage_compaction_effort). Also, the new tunable is an
    opaque value instead of asking for specific bounds of “external
    fragmentation” which would have been difficult to estimate. The internal
    interpretation of this opaque value allows for future fine-tuning.
    
    Currently, we use a simple translation from this tunable to [low, high]
    extfrag thresholds (low=100-hpage_compaction_effort, high=low+10%). To
    periodically check per-node extfrag status, we reuse per-node kcompactd
    threads which are woken up every few milliseconds to check the same. If
    any zone on its corresponding node has extfrag above the high threshold
    for the HPAGE_PMD_ORDER order, the thread starts compaction in
    background till all zones are below the low extfrag level for this
    order. By default. By default, the tunable is set to 0 (=> low=100%,
    high=100%).
    
    This patch is largely based on ideas from Michal Hocko posted here:
    https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20161230131412.GI13301@dhcp22.suse.cz/
    
    * Performance data
    
    System: x64_64, 32G RAM, 12-cores.
    
    I made a small driver that allocates as many hugepages as possible and
    measures allocation latency:
    
    The driver first tries to allocate hugepage using GFP_TRANSHUGE_LIGHT
    and if that fails, tries to allocate with `GFP_TRANSHUGE |
    __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL`. The drives stops when both methods fail for a
    hugepage allocation.
    
    Before starting the driver, the system was fragmented from a userspace
    program that allocates all memory and then for each 2M aligned section,
    frees 3/4 of base pages using munmap. The workload is mainly anonymous
    userspace pages which are easy to move around. I intentionally avoided
    unmovable pages in this test to see how much latency we incur just by
    hitting the slow path for most allocations.
    
  • NVIDIA Engineer Continues Working On Proactive Memory Compaction For Linux

    NVIDIA's Nitin Gupta continues working on proactive compaction for the Linux kernel's memory management code.

    This proactive compaction is designed to avoid the high latency introduced right now when the Linux kernel does on-demand compaction when an application needs a lot of hugepages. With this proactive compaction, a large number of hugepages can be requested while avoiding high latencies.

  • Intel Submits Last Bits For Linux 5.5 DRM Driver - Includes More TGL/Gen12, Discrete Bit

    Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.

    In the previous weeks they've been bringing up a lot of their Tiger Lake / Gen12 graphics code as the dominating theme for the Linux 5.5 kernel. There has also been Jasper Lake support, Xe multi-GPU prepping, and their other routine code clean-ups and driver improvements. Out this morning is the last of their feature work targeting Linux 5.5.

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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

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today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.