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).
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=1048576Thanks, very useful. 👍