Nice to see more Linux distributions make changes to ensure the gaming experience is good. Arch Linux is now following Fedora and Ubuntu on upping the vm.max_map_count value.
The issue is the default from the upstreaming Linux kernel is just too low for some games like The Finals, Hogwarts Legacy, DayZ, Counter-Strike 2 and various others causing them to crash. Not a good experience for end-users.
Announced in an official news post:
The vm.max_map_count paramater will be increased from the default
65530value to1048576.This change should help address performance, crash or start-up issues for a number of memory intensive applications, particularly for (but not limited to) some Windows games played through Wine/Steam Proton. Overall, end users should have a smoother experience out of the box with no expressed concerns about potential downsides in the related proposal on arch-dev-public mailing list.
This
vm.max_map_countincrease is introduced in the2024.04.07-1release of the filesystem package and will be effective right after the upgrade.Before upgrading, in case you are already setting your own value for that parameter in a
sysctl.dconfiguration file, either remove it (to switch to the new default value) or make sure your configuration file will be read with a higher priority than the/usr/lib/sysctl.d/10-arch.conffile (to supersede the new default value).
Pictured – DayZ
Want to know what your current value is? You can run this in terminal cat /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count
If you want to test a different value, in terminal you can run sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576 which will persist until a reboot.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
