this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
63 points (98.5% liked)

Linux

48692 readers
464 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I am looking to build a Linux gaming machine with open source firmware and Intel ME disabled. Is this viable?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 40 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The BIOS does a lot less than you'd expect, it doesn't really have an impact on gaming performance. For what it's worth, I've been gaming in a VM for years, and it uses the TianoCore/OVMF/EDK2 firmware, and no issues. Once Linux is booted, it doesn't really matter all that much. You're not even allowed to use firmware services after the OS is booted, it's only meant for bootloaders or simple applications. As long as all the hardware is initialized and configured properly it shouldn't matter.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’ve been gaming in a VM for years

Tell us more about your setup! I'm assuming you have 2 GPUs and are passing one to the VM for Windows gaming? Is it even worth doing nowadays now that Kernel AC games are banning VMs anyway?

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 16 points 1 month ago

Yes dual GPU. I set that up like 6 years ago, so its use changed over time. It used to be Windows but now it's another Linux VM.

The reason I still use it is it serves as a second seat and is very convenient at that. The GPU's output is connected to the TV, so the TV gets its own dedicated and independent OS. So my wife can use it when I'm not. When the VM isn't running I use the card as a render offload, so games get the full power of the better card as well.

I also use it for toying with macOS and Windows because both of those are basically unusable without some form of 3D acceleration. For Windows I use Looking Glass which makes it feel pretty native performance. I don't play games in it anymore but I still need to run Visual Studio to build the Windows exes for some projects.

This week I also used the second card to test out stuff on Bazzite because one if my friends finally made the switch and I need to be able to test things out in it as I have no fucking clue how uBlue works.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You'd think so but IIRC when Phoronix tested it, Coreboot would always significantly underperform compared to the regular firmware. It wasn't much but the effect was measurable.

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah it'll depend on how good your coreboot implementation is. AFAIK it's pretty good on Chromebooks because Google whereas a corebooted ThinkPad might have some downsides to it.

The slowdowns I would attribute to likely bad power management, because ultimately the code runs on the CPU with no involvement with the BIOS unless you call into it, which should be very little.

Looking up the article seems to confirm:

The main reason it seems for the Dasharo firmware offering lower performance at times was the Core i5 12400 being tested never exceeded a maximum peak frequency of 4.0GHz while the proprietary BIOS successfully hit the 4.4GHz maximum turbo frequency of the i5-12400. Meanwhile the Dasharo firmware never led to the i5-12400 clocking down to 600MHz on all cores as a minimum frequency during idle but there was a ~974MHz.

I'd expect System76 laptops to have a smaller performance gap if any since it's a first-party implementation and it's in their interest for that stuff to work properly. But I don't have coreboot computers so I can't validate, that's all assumptions.

That said for a 5% performance loss, I'd say it counts as viable. My games VM has a similar hit vs native. I've been gaming on Linux well before Proton and Steam and have taken much larger performance hits before just to avoid closing all my work to reboot for break time games.