this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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[–] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The default value is 65530

Just checked and the steam deck has it set to 2147483642. My gentoo systems are 65530.

[–] Malix@sopuli.xyz 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

On one hand, I'd assume Valve knows what they're doing, but also setting the value that high seems like it's effectively removing the guardrail alltogether. Is that safe, also what is the worst that can happen if an app starts using maps in the billions?

[–] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

OOM killer is what happens. But that can happen with the default setting as well.

[–] Malix@sopuli.xyz 5 points 7 months ago

no arguments there. Still, I kinda feel that raising the limit high enough to effectively turn off the limit is probably bit overboard. But, if it works, it works, but the kernel devs probably put the limit in place for a reason too.

The whole point is to prevent one process from using too much memory. The whole point of the Steam Deck is to have one process use all the memory.

So it makes sense to keep it relatively low for servers where runaway memory use is a bug that should crash the process, but not in a gaming scenario where high memory usage is absolutely expected.