LWN: Linux ecosystem contributions from SteamOS and kernel's preemption model
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Linux ecosystem contributions from SteamOS
The SteamOS Linux distribution is focused on gaming, naturally, but the effort to build it has resulted in contributions to multiple areas in the Linux ecosystem. Alberto Garcia has been working on SteamOS and came to Bilbao, Spain to describe some of those contributions at Open Source Summit Europe 2023. There are some obvious areas where a gaming-focused OS might contribute upstream, such as graphics, but the talk showed contributions in several other areas as well.
García introduced himself as an employee of Igalia, which happened to turn 22-years old on the day of his talk. He is also a longtime FOSS and Debian developer; he has previously worked on projects like QEMU and Maemo. Lately, he has been working on SteamOS and getting Linux working on the Steam Deck consumer hardware. One of the things he likes about free-software development is the way that new projects end up contributing to older projects that are not necessarily directly connected; SteamOS fits that model well.
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Revisiting the kernel's preemption model, part 2
In last week's episode, a need to preempt kernel code that is executing long-running instructions led to a deeper reexamination of how the kernel handles preemption. There are a number of supported preemption modes, varying from "none" (kernel code is never preemptible) to realtime (where the kernel is almost always preemptible). Making better use of the kernel's preemption machinery looked like a possible solution to the immediate problem, but it seems that there are better options in store. In short, kernel developers would like to give the scheduler complete control over CPU-scheduling decisions.