Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

Valve is practically singlehandedly dragging the Linux ecosystem forward in areas that nobody else wanted to touch.

They needed Windows games to run on Linux so we got massive Proton/Wine advancements. They needed better display output for the deck and we got HDR and VRR support in wayland. They also needed smoother frame pacing and we got a scheduler that Zuck is now using to run data centers.

Its funny to think that Meta's server efficiency is being improved because Valve paid Igalia to make Elden Ring stutter less on a portable Linux PC. This is the best kind of open source trickledown.

Something built to shave off latency on a handheld gaming device ends up scaling to hyperscale servers, not because anyone planned it that way, but because the abstraction was done right

> SCX-LAVD has been worked on by Linux consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve

It seems like every time I read about this kind of stuff, it's being done by contractors. I think Proton is similar. Of course that makes it no less awesome, but it makes me wonder about the contractor to employee ratio at Valve. Do they pretty much stick to Steam/game development and contract out most of the rest?

It's worth mentioning that sched_ext was developed at Meta. The schedulers are developed by several companies who collaborate to develop them, not just Meta or Valve or Italia and the development is done in a shared GitHub repo - https://github.com/sched-ext/scx.

I've been using Bazzite Desktop for 4 months now and it has been my everything. Windows is just abandonware now even with every update they push. It is clunky and hard to manage.

That's the magic of open source. Valve can't say ohh noes you need a deluxe enterprise license.

I'm curious how this came to be:

> Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.

I'm not at all in the know about this, so it would not even occur to me to test it. Is it the case that if you're optimizing Linux performance you'd just try whatever is available?

I keep being puzzled by the unwillingness of developers to deal with scheduling issues. Many developers avoid optimization, almost all avoid scheduling. There are some pretty interesting algorithms and data structures in that space, and doing it well almost always improves user experience. Often it even decreases total wall-clock time for a given set of tasks.

Maybe better to go straight to the source and bypass Phoronix blogspam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFItEHbFEwg

How well does Linux handle game streaming? I’m just now getting into it, and now that Windows10 is dead, I want to move my desktop PC over to linux, and end my relationship with Microsoft, formally.

I'm struggling to understand what workloads Meta might be running that are _this_ latency-critical.

Interesting to see server workloads take ideas from other areas. I saw recently that some of the k8s specific os do their updates like android devices

Can't find scxctl in Debian. Was it never packaged?

Omarchy should adopt the SCX-LAVD scheduler as its default, it helps conserve power on laptops.

[flagged]

Looks like open source helped create Silicon Valley, while no IP laws made Shenzhen. Sharing seems to really drive industry growth, so maybe the US and EU should rethink their IP laws?