tl;dr large gaming performance over stock CPU scheduler when there is a heavy CPU task running in background

Obviously, they only tested one game and it may not apply everywhere or hurt performance/latency in some cases.

One thing I wasn’t aware of is that sched-ext/ePBF supports changing CPU schedulers on-the-fly, which takes away one of the downsides of third-party schedulers. I.e. you can use the stock scheduler most of the time, but then switch to a third party scheduler for specific workloads. So less of a downside risk.

Finally, none of this is merged yet (including sched-ext) so it’s out of reach if you are just using the stock kernel.

  • @CurdieEnglish
    10•10 months ago

    The main improvement Rust provides is memory safety. It’s very easy to make mistakes in C where you could overrun a buffer or something, introducing unexpected crashing and making it vulnerable to exploitation by malware or whatever. Rust eliminates a whole category of issues with their clever memory management paradigm. The improvements in this schedule probably have more to do with the strategy used than code efficiency.

    • @surewhynotlemEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      Didn’t we already do that with c++ and c#? Is rust just c++++?

      • @CurdieEnglish
        3•10 months ago

        C and Rust are low level languages, suitable for interacting directly with the hardware. C++ might be described as C with some object oriented stuff bolted on, making it excellent for videogame development. C# is a lot more like Java. It’s great for line of business apps because it handles the complexity of memory management for you and provides an excellent framework and excellent libraries for a lot of common tasks. But it’s not suitable for low level work.