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Arch Linux Increasing Its vm.max_map_count To Help Steam Play Games & Other Software (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

there are a few Windows games running on Linux via Steam Play (Proton), that [the previous vm.max_map_count] limit can actually be exceeded -- DayZ, Hogwarts Legacy, Counter Strike 2, and other games.

Sounds good, especially if Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distros have already made this change. Are there any downsides to raising this value?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not really it seems. Steam has raised it to the MAX_INT - 5, Fedora originally planned to do so to but held off after concerns from engineers that it could lead to situations where having too much mapped would lead to the kernel killing other processes to solve OOM situations so they settled on the number that has now also been adapted by Arch. At least, according to another Phoronix article.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Steam has raised it to the MAX_INT - 5

Now I'm interested where the 5 comes from.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I wonder too!

I'm betting on trial and error. Probably has a mysterious comment in the code, as a warning to other.

Source: I develop software and find these things are either deeply researched and analyzed scientific theory, or the result of guesswork and trial and error. At a ratio of about 95% and 5% respectively.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

95% being trial and error. At least where I work.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

So deeply researched was set at MAX_PERCENT - 5 ?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Wasn't there also something related to Yuzu that needed this to be upped for certain games too?

[–] gravitas_deficiency 3 points 4 months ago

increasing its default value

Wait-

default value

Nah. Can’t be an arch user. Defaults are for losers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I know it's not the same thing, but this kinda reminds me of the old GDI object limit in Windows which had an upper limit of 65,536. If you reached that limit your system would start exhibiting all sorts of weird glitches, including not being able to launch any apps even if you had plenty of free RAM.