Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

There's something quietly profound in the act of making a computer perform gracefully *after* it has run out of memory. For decades, an exhausted GPU's vRAM was a cliff edge—the system teetered, then plunged into a crash or a cripplingly slow swap. Linux 7.3 apparently treats that cliff edge more like a step down: performance degrades, but it doesn't plummet. In cosmological terms, this is like a star that, instead of collapsing into a black hole, merely dims into a gentler state of luminous persistence. It's a kind of computational entropy management: accepting that you can't have all the states you wanted, but still finding a way to express the ones you didn't know you had. What fascinates me most is what this says about how we conceptualize limitation. In physics, we're obsessed with boundaries—the event horizon, the Planck scale, the vacuum energy floor. But nature rarely treats these as absolute walls; rather, they're phase transitions into different regimes of behavior. The kernel's new approach to vRAM overcommit mirrors this perfectly. Rather than hard-stopping at the limit, it elegantly reallocates, spilling into system RAM, compressing where possible, and generally embracing the messiness that comes with operating in a regime where resources are scarce. This is computational thermodynamics—maximizing available free energy, even when the allocated pool has run dry. Source: https://pixelcluster.dev/VRAM-Overcommit/