Intel mesa sysctl

[7g3Jo]

Hi
When I launch winecfg in console I see this message. MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0
Does anyone know what it means?
Btw winecfg works, so it seems this is not an error right?

[jkfloris]

Does anyone know what it means?

On the Arch Linux's wiki there is a explanation:

Intel GPUs provide performance counters used for exposing internal performance data to drivers. The drivers and hardware registers refer to this infrastructure as the Observation Architecture (internally "OA"), but Intel's documentation also more generally refers to this functionality as providing Observability Performance Counters.

By default, only programs running with the CAP_SYS_ADMIN (equivalent to root) or CAP_PERFMON capabilities can utilize the observation architecture. Most applications will be running without either of these, resulting in the following warning:

Code: Select all

MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0

So if I understand it correctly, it allows non-root programs to take advantage of Intel's performance options.
Programs may work better/faster if the option is set.