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Ubuntu 24.04 increases vm.max_map_count for smoother Linux gaming
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Just checked and the steam deck has it set to 2147483642. My gentoo systems are 65530.
On one hand, I'd assume Valve knows what they're doing, but also setting the value that high seems like it's effectively removing the guardrail alltogether. Is that safe, also what is the worst that can happen if an app starts using maps in the billions?
OOM killer is what happens. But that can happen with the default setting as well.
no arguments there. Still, I kinda feel that raising the limit high enough to effectively turn off the limit is probably bit overboard. But, if it works, it works, but the kernel devs probably put the limit in place for a reason too.
@Malix @psycho_driver From what I can remember this limitation (which either Fedora or Nobara overturned 1yr ago) was set way before video games that take up a lot of memory were a thing.
I got curious and decided to check this out. This value was set to the current one in 2009: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/341c87bf346f57748230628c5ad6ee69219250e8 The reasoning makes sense, but I guess is not really relevant to our situation, and according to the newest version of the comment 2^16 is not a hard limit anymore.
The whole point is to prevent one process from using too much memory. The whole point of the Steam Deck is to have one process use all the memory.
So it makes sense to keep it relatively low for servers where runaway memory use is a bug that should crash the process, but not in a gaming scenario where high memory usage is absolutely expected.