{"id":245196,"date":"2026-05-13T10:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/13\/your-old-potato-pc-might-game-better-with-this-linux-kernel-patch\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T11:55:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T15:55:12","slug":"your-old-potato-pc-might-game-better-with-this-linux-kernel-patch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/13\/your-old-potato-pc-might-game-better-with-this-linux-kernel-patch\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Old Potato PC Might Game Better With This Linux Kernel Patch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your Old Potato PC Might Game Better With This Linux Kernel Patch<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/itsfoss.com\/news\/linux-scheduler-patch-gaming-old-hardware\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-13 10:15:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: itsfoss.com<\/a><\/p>\n

As a gamer, if you have gamed on Linux with hardware that’s seen better days, there’s some work happening in the kernel that’s worth keeping an eye on.<\/p>\n

Linux kernel developer Peter Zijlstra has posted the second version of a patch series called “sched: Flatten the pick,” aimed at fixing gaps in how the Linux scheduler handles cgroup scheduling.<\/p>\n

Calling it “a pain in the ar*e,” he has tracked the issue down to a formula that fragments a task group’s total weight across every CPU on the system.<\/p>\n

On a 64-core machine, Peter says, a cgroup is already down to roughly a nice 19 task worth of priority per CPU, and at 256 cores, which is not unusual in servers today, the margin gets even tinier.<\/p>\n

He breaks the rest of the problem into two parts, where the usual fix for the first is to inflate the group weight by the CPU count, but when all of a group’s load lands on a single CPU, that weight balloons well past nice -20 (priority value of the process), and the math starts breaking down.<\/p>\n

The second is how the scheduler picks the next task to run. It currently has to step through multiple cgroup levels to get there; the fix collapses all of that into a single level instead.<\/p>\n

He ran what he calls a little experiment, using an older configuration with an Intel Core i7-2600K and AMD Radeon RX 580<\/strong>, loading up Shadows: Awakening from GOG through Lutris, using GE-Proton10-34 and Steam Runtime 3 (sniper).<\/p>\n

To properly stress the setup, he threw 8 spinner processes at it alongside the game, one per CPU thread, and watched it go from playable to “almost unplayable, as in proper terrible.”<\/p>\n

He then restarted it with a shorter scheduler time slice set to one-tenth of the default via chrt and recorded both sessions using MangoHud. This is what he got. \ud83d\udc47<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Metric<\/th>\nDefault slice<\/th>\nShorter slice<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
FPS min<\/td>\n3.8<\/td>\n20.6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
FPS avg<\/td>\n48.0<\/td>\n57.2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
FPS max<\/td>\n87.4<\/td>\n80.3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Frame time min (ms)<\/td>\n9.4<\/td>\n8.4<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Frame time avg (ms)<\/td>\n34.5<\/td>\n19.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Frame time max (ms)<\/td>\n107.4<\/td>\n37.2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Closing the…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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