Linux Gaming @lemmy.ml iso @lemy.lol 6 mo. ago

BTRFS for Linux gaming?

I'm using EndeavourOS with ext4 file system for daily usage and a dual bootable Windows for gaming. What I want to have right now is getting rid of Windows completely.

When I tried it before, I had to try multiple tweaks for a game and find which one worked on Linux. Therefore, I want to take a snapshot with BTRFS and try it until I find the right configuration.

While I have quite a bit of experience with Linux, I've never used BTRFS. Do you think it's worth it?

I thought about keeping the games on the ext4 system, but I hate splitting the disk. I'm thinking of keeping the games in a non-snapshot volume.

UPDATE: I just re-installed EndeavourOS with BTRFS + snapper + BTRFS Assistant :)

21 comments

Btrfs will be fine, I use btrfs on a standard arch install, timeshift for managing snapshots, works well.
- Cool! Thats what I wanted to hear coz I want to do the same :)
  
  Since you're on EndeavourOS, I suggest using btrfs-assistant instead of timeshift, since it was created by one of the devs and offers more functionality with snapper. Just create a new profile for your root partition and then configure how often you want it to take snapshots.
  
  You can also install snap-pac so that you get OpenSUSE-like automatic snapshots everytime pacman executes a install/remove/update command.
I use openSUSE Tumbleweed and it has BTRFS and snapper (snapshot manager) set up by default, with all necessary system subvolumes already created. It’s been a great experience for gaming so far, and actually the best experience with NVIDIA drivers I’ve had! All you would need to do is create a separate BTRFS subvolume and snapper config for your games folder and you’d be good to go, without worrying about any other setup! No need to use EXT4 at all. Additionally, there is very detailed snapper documentation on the openSUSE website.

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/archive/15.0/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.snapper.html#id-1.4.3.4.2.2

Additionally, you can get support from the community in the openSUSE Matrix Space: https://matrix.to/#/%23space:opensuse.org

Use the support channel (#support:opensuse.org) or the gaming channel (#gaming:opensuse.org)
Just put steam on a different subvolume, otherwise your snapshots will be huge

Edit: to be clear, you can just put steamapps in a different subvolume keep the proton / save data folders in the snapshot area
I found that copying directories was much more convenient for this kind of experimentation, since I was usually already working in a filemanager anyways. And thanks to BTRFS's copy-on-write support it was also instantaneous and didn't take up any additional space. So in the end very similar to snapshots.
- +1 cp -a --reflink is super useful for making quick no cost clones of huge directories.
  
  Afaik the --reflink isn't needed any more with modern coreutils versions.
There's no reason btrfs shouldn't work for every use case.

That said I think the slight performance gains of ext4 over btrfs make it worth sticking to ext4 for games. Imo it's similar to as if you had you main system on an HDD but ran games off of an SSD; that's how much faster it feels.

I would install games to a separate ext4 partition but steam to btrfs (for configs) in that case.
- RAID 5/6 aren't yet recommended for general use on BTRFS by the developers.
  
  Other than that I agree it should be suitable for anything, and an improvement over ext4 in some situations.
  
  If you don't know what RAID 5/6 is you are good.
  
  And even then, you should probably be using RAID 10 instead. Resilvering a RAID 5 array is hard on the disks, so there's an elevated risk of the entire RAID failing. RAID 6 should eliminate this, but in a desktop system, do you really have enough space to make it worthwhile? You'd need 5+ drives to beat RAID 10 capacity, and that's a lot of space. IMO, RAID 5/6 is just not a great option in general. Don't cheap out on your RAID setup, do the industry standard, which is RAID 10.
  
  I use BTRFS in a RAID 1 on my NAS (plan to upgrade to RAID 10 when I run out of space), and no RAID on my desktop. Everything important gets backed up to my NAS.
To answer the direct question, BTRFS works fine for gaming. Garuda uses BTRFS by default and I've been daily driving it for a few years now. My gaming machine hasn't had an unrecoverable failure that wasn't my fault (not checking consple output for errors when updating and then rebooting). Games on an ext4 file system work fine - that's what I do for games I don't play often. The main NVME is for games that are played regularly and everything else goes to the storage SSDs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you want an immutable distro more than BTRFS for what you want to do.
- I don't know much about immutable distros, but with a quick look, you're probably right. It looks like Bazzite is based on Fedora atomic desktop.
  
  Yeah same here regarding immutable distros. I've only dabbled in the reading and it seems to fit your use case. ^^
  
  Keeping my eye on the thread for future reference. Best of luck!
What do you mean splitting the disk? I just recently removed windows, moved and resized both boot and primary partition to take over all the space, now it is a pure Ext4 disk. I would not use BTRFS for your use case but that is up to you.
- I meant using BTRFS for system and ext4 for the game folder. Why you wouldn't use BTRFS though?
  
  I saw the other comments, BTRFS appears to work fine, I wouldn't use it because it is unfinished (there are some features not ready according to the status page) but I guess it is stable.
I use BTRFS on root on openSUSE and it works fine. I don't interact with the snapshot feature much beyond system updates (and very rare rollbacks), but it's nice. I use an encrypted boot w/ an NVMe drive, and things work fine.

I'm not sure what the point of ext4 is for a system drive vs BTRFS, BTRFS on root has served me well for years (5-ish on my desktop, 7-ish on my NAS).

You can set up subvolumes and whatnot to snapshot just part of the tree as well. Or you can copy/paste the whole directory and run dedup (should work, haven't tried).
what filesystem you use to store your games on shouldn't matter. as long as the file system is able to store the files you need and supports the file permissions unix systems use it doesn't really matter.
i recall things like file management are a little faster on btrfs, but it has no impact on game performance or loading times for as far as i'm aware
I've been on BTRFS for like 3 years now, and I use my main driver for linux gaming. It's fine. The only downside with BTRFS I've seen is it can like, lose sanity if something goes wrong on dismount, and then it takes like 3+ extra mins per boot, but it seems to be able to work itself out after enough mount/dismounts, although I've read that can be permanent and then you need to blow away the whole volume or deal with it.
Timeshift

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