SteamOS 3.3 Beta Released With Updated Drivers, Many Fixes

[MightyMax]

why SteamDeck don't use BTRFS file system? BTRFS is File system for the future. BTRFS was in development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status here you can see status of features of BTRFS


new packages is released btrfs-progs v5.18.1 (June 2022)


The core data structure of Btrfs—the copy-on-write B-tree—was originally proposed by IBM researcher Ohad Rodeh at a presentation at USENIX 2007. Chris Mason, an engineer working on ReiserFS for SUSE at the time, joined Oracle later that year and began work on a new file system based on these B-trees.

In 2008, the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, Theodore Ts'o, stated that although ext4 has improved features, it is not a major advance; it uses old technology and is a stop-gap. Ts'o said that Btrfs is the better direction because "it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management". Btrfs also has "a number of the same design ideas that reiser3/4 had".

Btrfs 1.0, with finalized on-disk format, was originally slated for a late-2008 release, and was finally accepted into the Linux kernel mainline in 2009. Several Linux distributions began offering Btrfs as an experimental choice of root file system during installation.

In July 2011, Btrfs automatic defragmentation and scrubbing features were merged into version 3.0 of the Linux kernel mainline. Besides Mason at Oracle, Miao Xie at Fujitsu contributed performance improvements. In June 2012, Chris Mason left Oracle for Fusion-io, which he left a year later with Josef Bacik to join Facebook. While at both companies, Mason continued his work on Btrfs.

In 2012, two Linux distributions moved Btrfs from experimental to production or supported status: Oracle Linux in March,^[28] followed by SUSE Linux Enterprise in August.

In 2015, Btrfs was adopted as the default filesystem for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.

In August 2017, Red Hat announced in the release notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.4 that it no longer planned to move Btrfs, which had been included as a "technology preview" since RHEL 6 beta, to a fully supported feature, noting that it would remain available in the RHEL 7 release series.^[31] Btrfs was removed from RHEL 8 in May 2019. RHEL moved from ext4 in RHEL 6 to XFS in RHEL 7.

In 2020, Btrfs was selected as the default file system for Fedora 33 for desktop variants.

Features

List of features

Implemented

As of version 5.0 of the Linux kernel, Btrfs implements the following features:

• Mostly self-healing in some configurations due to the nature of copy-on-write
• Online defragmentation and an autodefrag mount option
• Online volume growth and shrinking
• Online block device addition and removal
• Online balancing (movement of objects between block devices to balance load)
• Offline filesystem check
• Online data scrubbing for finding errors and automatically fixing them for files with redundant copies
• RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 10
• Subvolumes (one or more separately mountable filesystem roots within each disk partition)
• Transparent compression via zlib, LZO and (since 4.14) ZSTD, configurable per file or volume
• Atomic writable (via copy-on-write) or read-only Snapshots of subvolumes
• File cloning (reflink, copy-on-write) via cp --reflink <source file> <destination file>
• Checksums on data and metadata (CRC-32C). New hash functions are implemented since 5.5: xxHash, SHA256, BLAKE2B.
• In-place conversion from ext3/4 to Btrfs (with rollback). This feature regressed around btrfs-progs version 4.0, rewritten from scratch in 4.6.
• Union mounting of read-only storage, known as file system seeding (read-only storage used as a copy-on-write backing for a writable Btrfs)
• Block discard (reclaims space on some virtualized setups and improves wear leveling on SSDs with TRIM)
• Send/receive (saving diffs between snapshots to a binary stream)^[47]
• Incremental backup
• Out-of-band data deduplication (requires userspace tools)
• Ability to handle swap files and swap partitions

Implemented but not recommended for production use
Hierarchical per-subvolume quotas

• RAID 5, RAID 6

Planned but not yet implemented
In-band data deduplication

• Online filesystem check
• RAID with up to six parity devices, surpassing the reliability of RAID 5 and RAID 6
• Object-level RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 10
• Encryption
• Persistent read and write cache (L2ARC + ZIL, lvmcache, etc.)

In 2009, Btrfs was expected to offer a feature set comparable to ZFS, developed by Sun Microsystems. After Oracle's acquisition of Sun in 2009, Mason and Oracle decided to continue with Btrfs development.

[Mangix]

what should I use for my raspberry pi 4? SD read and write speeds are shit.

SD speeds are a combination of the card, controller, and kernel. If any one of those is messed up, you'd probably get the slowest speed of 25MB/s.

If ext4 is too slow, try disabling the journal. If that doesn't do it, I guess try ext2.

[jorgepl]

Fun fact: some people use ext2 instead of ext4 on flash memory because of less writes.

what should I use for my raspberry pi 4? SD read and write speeds are shit.

[Mangix]

Fun fact: some people use ext2 instead of ext4 on flash memory because of less writes.

[R41N3R]

I hoped that KDE might get updated with a new Steam OS release. Anyway nice update.

[brucethemoose]

We used f2fs for a while until we figured out that it was quite unstable, destroying itself and then be unable to fix itself. We are now back to ext4 which just works, and it works equally well on the Steam Deck, SD performance is amazing, zero issues playing AAA games from it.

Yeah I have heard others say this as well... how long ago was it?

My Arch root from 2021 has been stable, even with a bunch of hard crashes. But then again I haven't bee testing it *that* long, and I am running some perplexingly non default integrity checking options.

[pdbecid]

I guess then Samsung engineers are just stupid, because they switched their phone's fs to f2fs. Google also uses f2fs for their Pixel phones.

Different architectures, different devices, different operating system, different use cases. F2FS and even XFS are faster on flash memory, but we're talking 1% to 3% in synthetics and it doesn't correlate to real world usage (specially loading times). Even if the gains were major, it wouldn't merit the risk of data loss.

[RejectModernity]

We used f2fs for a while until we figured out that it was quite unstable, destroying itself and then be unable to fix itself. We are now back to ext4 which just works, and it works equally well on the Steam Deck, SD performance is amazing, zero issues playing AAA games from it.

I guess then Samsung engineers are just stupid, because they switched their phone's fs to f2fs. Google also uses f2fs for their Pixel phones.

[vegabook]

Been an Ubuntu guy for 10 years, just works. Loving Arch on the Steam Deck. `nix-env-chroot` does a pretty good job of giving me my dev toolchain without un-write-protecting the root filesystem. IE updates don't break anything and I still get to run things which need root write access. Bonus: learn nix 🤕

[Citan]

Hey everyone!

So, about "expanded keyboard support" I guess it's still only the virtual keyboard... Did anyone around here with a Steam Deck and non-English native manage to (re?)install the core packages required to properly set the full system (or at least physical keyboard) in non-English languages?

I had found some tutorial on Reddit which gave a list of commands to run but not many explications about each of them (https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/c..._desktop_mode/), and when at the "locale-genstep I come across a "cannot open definition file "en_GB" : no such file or directory" error. Apparently reinsstalling glibc package could resolve the trouble, but I'm kinda afraid doing it since I don't really understand those commands.

Wondering if any around succeeded and, if encountered same trouble, how you resolved it...