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CachyOS

CachyOS Settings

Alongside our optimized kernels and repositories, we also provide settings that further improve the desktop experience. We also bundle in some helper scripts to for QoL improvements. All these configurations and scripts are under the cachyos-settings package.

sysctl Tweaks

We provide a lot of sysctl tweaks that aims to improve overall desktop performance. Each sysctl entry is documented well in the file 99-cachyos-settings.conf

To make changes to any of these values, copy the original entry and make a new file under /etc/sysctl.d/ for the modified value.

Modifying sysctl values

  1. Take a look at the original value from cachyos-settings

    Terminal window
    ❯ cat /usr/lib/sysctl.d/99-cachyos-settings.conf
    # Only experimental!
    # Let Realtime tasks run as long they need
    # sched: RT throttling activated
    kernel.sched_rt_runtime_us=-1

  2. Make a new file in /etc/sysctl.d to make changes to the sysctl settings

    Reverting kernel.sched_rt_runtime_us= to its default value
    ❯ sudo micro /etc/sysctl.d/99-kernel-sched-rt.conf # If the file doesn't exist, this command creates and lets you edit the file
    kernel.sched_rt_runtime_us=950000

udev Rules

  • ZRAM Rules - Sets ZRAM swappiness to a more aggressive value so cache is more likely to swap to ZRAM
  • HPET Permissions - Allows access to rtc0 and hpet device nodes by the audio group.
  • SATA Power Management - Sets power management policy of SATA devices to max_performance
  • I/O Scheduler Rules - Selects the optimal scheduler for each drive type (HDD, SSD, NVMe)
  • hdparm Rules - Sets SATA and IDE HDDs to maximum performance
  • NVIDIA RTD3 - Configures dynamic power management functionality for the Turing GPU generation. RTD3 does not work properly on Turing GPUs with the open modules
  • CPU DMA Latency - Allows access to the cpu_dma_latency device node by the audio group.
  • NTSync - Allows ntsync to be accessed by user-space applications

modprobe Options

  • Forces AMDGPU driver on Southern Islands (GCN 1.0) and Sea Islands (GCN 2.0)
  • Enable various tweaks for NVIDIA
  • Blacklist watchdog modules

Helper Scripts

  • amdpstate-guided - Sets the amd-pstate scaling driver to guided and switches the CPU governor to schedutil

  • cachyos-bugreport.sh - Collects various logs from inxi, dmesg and journalctl to aid in troubleshooting

  • game-performance - Wrapper script for powerprofilesctl to switch to performance profile on-demand. See Power Profile Switching On Demand

  • kerver - QoL script to show information about the current kernel

  • ksmctl - Utility to enable merging same memory pages into one for better performance and lower memory usage. Adds a significant CPU overhead

    Terminal window
    ❯ sudo ksmctl --enable

  • ksmstats - Shows general savings from Kernel Samepage Merging

  • paste-cachyos - Script to paste terminal output for text files from the system

    Terminal window
    ❯ paste-cachyos /path/to/file

  • pci-latency

    Enabling pci-latency systemwide
    ❯ sudo systemctl enable --now pci-latency.service

  • sbctl-batch-sign - Helper script to easily sign kernel images and EFI binaries for secure boot and saves them to sbctl’s database

  • topmem - Shows up to 10 processes which are currently using the highest amount of RAM in a descending order

Other configurations