Linux kernel and game performance?

Stefan Dösinger stefan at codeweavers.com
Wed Oct 27 15:14:52 CDT 2010


Am 26.10.2010 um 01:26 schrieb Dan Kegel:

> Hey folks,
> I've run into two web sites that claim that the Linux kernel causes performance
> problems in particular games (see below).  Anybody know of others?
UT 3 I think. It spends a lot of time in task switching, but I have no proof that it is indeed a kernel bug and not a wine bug or a red herring. Interestingly it only hits the unmodified game hard, games based on the engine(e.g. Mass Effect 2) seem to be less affected.

Don't get fooled by oprofile though. A high amount of time spent in vmlinux may be because of time spent in the driver module or oprofile itself.

> And has anybody found concrete improvements in performance
> of a particular app (other than an audio workstation app) from using
> a realtime kernel?
I wouldn't expect a realtime kernel to improve performance in general, since realtime constraints make achieving overall performance harder(e.g. limit the ability to cache writes). I haven't experimented with a realtime kernel though.




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