Linux Gaming @lemmy.world iso @lemy.lol 2 wk. 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 :)

38 comments

I use Fedora which defaults to BTRFS and never once had an issue with any game because of it. Your file system shouldn't matter for gaming at all so long as you stay on Linux native ones and avoid NTFS Windows drives.
- This. I’ve not had any issues across my laptop or desktop.
- I was worried about the possible high overhead of CoW in BTRFS. I guess it won't cause much of a problem. Thank you 🙏
  
  Unless you're making hundreds of snapshots with massive changes between each it won't matter. It might matter if you plan to use spinning rust as your main drive, but I imagine you'll be using an SSD.
- My Linux stream library is on Ntfs, for theoretical compatibility purposes with Windows which I never boot any more anyway, but generally I have had zero problems apart from an issue with Dota 2 a few years ago where I had to symlink some folder. But I don't think think it is needed anymore.
  
  Good to know the situation with cross compatibility has improved! I just saw enough posts of people having issues with a shared Windows/Linux NTFS drive over the years to advice against that setup.
- Isn’t arch-chroot a bit different in btrfs?
  
  I think you mean having to mount the subvolumes instead of the partition itself.
  
  This can be done by mount -o subvol=whatever /btrfspartition /mountpoint
  
  After having done that it's the same.
  
  I don't know? It's been a long time since I used Arch, and besides OP is using EndeavourOS so it won't matter.
Btrfs is amazing for a steam library. The single best feature is the compression. Games tend to have lot of unoptimized assets which compress really well. Because decompression is typically faster than your disk, it can potentially make games load faster too.

I put a second dedicated nvme drive in my PC just for steam. It's only 512GB but it holds a surprisingly large library.
- and ~~my axe~~ deduping. all those dlls and wine prefixes that contain them occupy space only once.
- I actually found the opposite with my steam library; on ZFS with ZSTD I only saw a ratio of 1.1 for steamapps, not that there's really any meaningful performance penalty for compressing it.
  
  It depends on what sort of games you play. Some games / genres / publishers are much worse about this than others.
  
  OK I just measured mine. I have 459GiB of games on the drive, consuming 368GiB of space. That's about 25% compression. I'm using compress=zstd:9.
  
  I should try deduplication. I have 4 steam users and I've created an ACL hell to prevent the same game being downloaded and installed twice.
- Is the compression opt-in or is it enabled by default?
  
  You have to enable compression in fstab.
BTRFS is worth it. It's a bit faster than ext4. And with BTRFS assistant or snapper, you can configure automatic snapshots of your OS partition. And grub-btrfs will allow to integrate them to the boot menu. Once you are booted via snapshot, there is a way to replace / file system with that snapshot permanently, or you can boot to another one.

And remember, snapshots in BTRFS is just a formal thing, use them only if you specifically need their features, like read only sub volumes. If you just need to backup some directory, for example with steam games, no need to do the actual snapshot. You can easily backup large amount of data with just cp -dr dir dir_backup no matter how large is it, it will be done immidetelly and without taking additional space.
BTRFS works great across all my drives under Nobara. Same applues when I access these drives from Ubuntu.

Steam also has no issues in my case. Even wine works line Intended.
I've always used BTRFS with rolling release distros like Arch or Tumbleweed and never had an issue with the filesystem.
I've been happy with btrfs. No issues with gaming. There's even a pretty good Windows driver, which I've used successfully to transfer data between Linux & Windows. Though I haven't installed Windows itself to btrfs, which is apparently possible!
Butter is amazing especially on ostree like fedora atomic for example
- What makes butter better than btrfs for ostree systems?
iirc Garuda Linux defaults to it, and is gaming focused distro of arch. Whether its worth it is up to you, but there are already users who daily drive it that way.

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