Open Source Summit North America 2024

This talk dives into how the scheduler impacts your gameplay on Linux and unveils our journey to smoother gameplay. How does task scheduling impact Linux gaming? Suboptimal task scheduling can cause stuttering while playing games on the Steam Deck game console. First, we nail down the enemy. What exactly is "stuttering," and how can we measure its impact on your gameplay? Next, we extensively analyzed the characteristics of game tasks from the scheduler’s point of view. Characterizing task behavior in Linux gaming helps to understand why some schedulers create much stuttering and others create less and to unveil the secrets behind smooth vs. choppy performance. Lastly, we will share our progress on the optimized scheduler for reducing the stuttering problems in Linux gaming, especially Steam Deck. We implemented the scheduling policy based on sched_ext, a BPF-based extensible scheduling framework.