Level Up Your Game: OS Kernel and Game Interactions revealed with Perfetto
summary
Perfetto collects ftrace events (sched_switch, sched_waking, sched_wakeup, IRQ and softirq entry/exit) and a minimal config yields ~2–3% tracing overhead while exposing scheduler and interrupt impact. A Pixel 8 trace of Angry Birds shows 41.48s of 90s (~46% CPU utilization) with IRQs 4.05s (~10% of time), frame cadence at 16.6ms (60 FPS), and scheduler overhead around 10–15%. Use trace_processor SQL or Python bindings to compute true thread runtime and detect memory leaks via periodic snapshots.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to Perfetto
- 1:06Why Perfetto for gaming
- 7:09Perfetto basics and config
- 9:13CPU utilization analysis
- 11:22Frame rate and timing
- 12:28Interrupt and softirq impact
- 14:36Thread wakeup dependencies
- 17:35OS scheduler overhead
- 19:42CPU idle states
- 20:47Trace processor deep dive
- 22:12Memory leak detection
- 24:15Q&A on trace collection
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