Ubuntu's Zsys For OpenZFS Linux Installs Sees First Update In A Year

[skeevy420]

Since Valve hasn't commented on this afaik, I would hesitate to assume this. COW based filesystems do have some advanced features but they come at a performance and resource usage cost and Steam deck can suffer from either of those. If this is truly desirable for Value, it doesn't look like it would be a big lift to support this.

I can't disagree with any of that, and I think it'd be cool if BTRFS picked up the insensitive ability, I just know why Valve is going with Ext4 for $HOME. Case sensitivity and game mods. Like I said above, extracting Windows game mods on Linux is one of Dante's Levels of Hell.

That said, a lot of times performance can be gained and resource usage cost can be lowered at the cost of safeties like custom mount & mkfs options...don't ask, I don't know them for BTRFS; I just know they exist. I know with ZFS you can bypass the ZIL/cache, skip checksumming, and other things to mitigate COW overhead -- perfect options for games folders since Steam offers scan and repair options. I assume BTRFS can likely do the same or similar.

[mdedetrich]

Since Valve hasn't commented on this afaik, I would hesitate to assume this. COW based filesystems do have some advanced features but they come at a performance and resource usage cost and Steam deck can suffer from either of those. If this is truly desirable for Value, it doesn't look like it would be a big lift to support this.

The bigger reason might just be performance. While its true that BTRFS/ZFS should be the default (especially if you care about your data), all of that functionality comes at a cost of performance and probably more critically for a device like steam deck power usage.

Ontop of that, at least game data is not an issue if it happens to get corrupted because Steam has a feature that checksums your entire game installation to make sure it hasn't been tampered with somehow. The only problem here may be save game files but there is Steam Cloud which saves your save files on the cloud (although I admit this isn't a complete solution).

Would be interesting to see if Valve went for something crazy like F2FS, although not sure if F2FS also supports case insensitivity. Would have been interesting to see the performance/power usage difference especially with the lower tier Steam Deck that doesn't have an NVMe but rather standard flash based storage. The fact that F2FS doesn't work well with mechanical hard drives is a non issue here since the Steam deck is not going to have a mechanical hard drive inside of it.

And in any case regarding case insensitivity, I would have done the same thing. Valve did the sensible decision which is rather than wait for the feature to be added to BTRFS and also being tested properly (which historically hasn't been BTRF's strong point) its better to go with something more established. Heck if you are going for the "right tool for the job" argument, it might make more sense to add case insensitivity to F2FS and use that instead of Ext4 rather than BTRFS.

[RahulSundaram]

Heck if you are going for the "right tool for the job" argument, it might make more sense to add case insensitivity to F2FS and use that instead of Ext4.

F2FS already supports that and Phoronix covered it as well at that time. Ext4 support is older since it was the very first for natively supported filesystems in Linux but not by much. No idea why they picked Ext4 in particular but overall seems like a fairly sensible choice given their constraints. Plenty of Android systems do the same.

[mdedetrich]

F2FS already supports that and Phoronix covered it as well at that time. Ext4 support is older since it was the very first for natively supported filesystems in Linux but not by much. No idea why they picked Ext4 in particular but overall seems like a fairly sensible choice given their constraints. Plenty of Android systems do the same.

Ah no idea F2FS support case insensitivity, learned something new. I guess its clear that Valve went the more conservative option, F2FS seems like technically the best tool for this problem.

[Britoid]

Such a shame. I had high hopes for ZSys. Which other distribution offer you the option to make a system snapshot every time you do an update and the possibility to revert to a previous snapshot from Grub in case something breaks and have all of it working out of the box?

Silverblue I guess?