Linux 7.3 Makes Running Out of VRAM Less Painful
Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
When a game exceeds your GPU's VRAM, performance usually tanks and crashes follow. But Linux 7.3 aims to change that. The kernel now handles VRAM overcommitment more gracefully, fixing a deadlock that caused command submissions to fail under memory pressure. This patch, based on work by AMD, allows the GPU to access system memory more efficiently, turning what was once a stability nightmare into a mere performance hit.
Depending on how much the evicted memory gets accessed and how well these accesses cache, you might just be able to run out of VRAM without (completely) ruining performance!
- krisknez
I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.
- exceptione
Great article! I share the same hunch as the author does; when allocating memory ultimately the application itself is in the best position to inform the kernel about the desired stickiness to VRAM. The best a kernel can do is guessing.
As a side note, it strikes me how much we owe to young trans people for low level performance engineering.
- inventor7777
I see all the comments about how Windows and Linux handle OOM, but I suppose I'll also mention macOS.
On my M4 Max Mac Studio if I try to load too big of an AI model with protections off, the desktop starts glitching back and forth between the past few hundred frames. It looks bad when it happens but CtrlC still works to kill llama.cpp and if you were using LM Studio, SSH also works. Once you kill the offending process, or if macOS does it for you, the desktop comes back immediately.
- d3Xt3r
Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out.
Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday!".
- Lunar5227
Well written and very informative. I am glad we have these enthusiastic people around for Linux kernel development!
- dormento
A curious thing happens in my Ubuntu 24 system, maybe that's just the normal OoM killer algo but no matter what process is hogging, Firefox is killed. Chrome eating too much memory? Firefox dies. Too many apps open? Firefox dies. Its funny.
- Beijinger
You know what I would like to have? An application that sends a kill / kill -9 signal to a specific app, example Chromes, when things go south.
- hypfer
I'll be the one to ask the obvious question:
What does this mean for compute workloads? Specifically, LLM inference.
Does it mean anything at all, or is this purely a games-thing?