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Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve's Steam Deck On Its Servers (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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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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[–] 4 points 10 months ago

Really interesting. Perhaps we can try running it on normal PCs too to see what it does.
Oh, and on RISC V stuff.

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    [–] 5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 44 points 10 months ago* (last edited 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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    • 9 comments in c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca view that post
    [–] 28 points 10 months ago (8 children)

    All they do is take

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  • [–] 19 points 10 months ago* (3 children)

    I hate meta as much as the next guy, but according to this they are the #3 organization in terms of kernel contributions, behind only Intel and Red Hat...

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I hate Facebook as much as the next guy, but they did create React, as well as some other contributions.

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    • 1 comment in c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz view that post
    [–] 24 points 10 months ago

    The presentation at LPC 2025 by Meta engineers was in fact titled "How do we make a Steam Deck scheduler work on large servers." At Meta they have explored SCX_LAVD as a "default" fleet scheduler for their servers that works for a range of hardware and use-cases for where they don't need any specialized scheduler.

    🤣

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