Increasing the default vm.max_map_count value
2024-04-07 - Robin Candau
The vm.max_map_count paramater will be increased from the default 65530 value to 1048576.
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_count increase is introduced in the 2024.04.07-1 release 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.d configuration 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.conf file (to supersede the new default value).
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It’s just a config. You can adjust that on whatever distro you are.
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You can temporarily set it using
sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576
. How to permanently set the value will vary depending on the distro. iirc on debian and fedora, you can create a file under/etc/sysctl.d/
directory with contentvm.max_map_count=1048576
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Pop!_OS, Fedora, and I think Ubuntu as well have already done this change long ago in this sequence. So no need to switch to Arch. Also, you can edit this manually, it’s just about changing the default.
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Found this, from almost a year ago : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/IncreaseVmMaxMapCount#Benefit_to_Fedora