Intel Linux Graphics Driver Will Now Be Less Restrictive Over RAM Use
Written by Michael Larabel
A change merged yesterday to the Intel Mesa graphics driver code lessens a restriction around the amount of system memory (RAM) that can be used by processes for the Vulkan system heap. This will allow more games/apps to work with the Intel integrated graphics that previously exceeded the driver-enforced limits but at the risk of running into broader out-of-memory behavior if under too much memory pressure.
The change is about restoring a previously-set 75% limit of RAM for the system heap with the Intel ANV Vulkan driver. For the past eight years there’s been a 50% limit of RAM for the system heap.
Intel Linux graphics driver engineer Paulo Zanoni argued in the year-old Mesa merge request:
“Unfortunately we can’t make everyone happy, but my main motivation here is that certain workloads can actually work with my system, and the only thing stopping them from working is this restriction is we inflict in ourselves. Examples: Deathloop on 16GB TGL, certain graphics settings of Spider-Man Remastered on my 16GB non-upgradeable-RAM LNL, Renderdoc.
Of course, this always brings the risk that running too many things at once may awake the OOM monster, but IMHO, completely preventing certain workloads from working is too high of a price to pay in a situation where you can just use /usr/bin/kill something. Still, I’m open to discussion here. We don’t need to apply all patches in the series.”
