Disk space check before "Discovering existing files"

[kaydenl]

I installed Steam on a new computer, and copied over my SteamApps folder from another machine so I wouldn't have to re-download ~150GB of games.

Normally, clicking "Install" then causes Steam to "Discover existing files..." and skip downloading the game (or only download a small amount of updates). This is great.

However, it doesn't work when you're low on disk space. Steam first checks that there's enough hard drive space for a full install. If there isn't, it refuses to continue, so it never reaches the "Discover existing files" step...when it would realize it actually needs 0 MB of space.

Thanks for your time!

[Sephiroth1983]

Indeed, this issue is annoying.

[AsgerHB]

The issue that has been referenced is closed, reason cited is that it's a duplicate of this issue.("Circular reference: See Reference, Circular") This issue is preventing me from discovering files on external drive, robbing me of an hour's playtime with my little brother before I have to catch the bus.

[kgagnon]

After 4 years do we know if this will be fixed?

[tchebb]

Since this issue is still not fixed, I have created a workaround which uses LD_PRELOAD to override the function that Steam uses to find the free space and make it think that the disk has 0% usage. Save the following as fakefree.c and follow the instructions in the header:

/*
 * Intercept calls to statvfs64(), which is used by Steam to determine
 * free disk space, and indicate that all space is available. This is
 * needed to work around the fact that Steam checks available disk space
 * before it checks for existing files.
 *
 * Please ONLY use this preload when you need it to install a game, then
 * relaunch Steam without it so that disk space detection works again.
 *
 * To compile:
 *   gcc -shared -fPIC -m32 -o fakefree.so fakefree.c -ldl
 *
 * To use (after ensuring Steam is not running):
 *   LD_PRELOAD=<path-to-fakefree.so> steam
 *
 * This code is Public Domain.
 */
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <sys/statvfs.h>

int statvfs64(const char *path, struct statvfs64 *buf)
{
    static int (*real)(const char *, struct statvfs64 *) = NULL;
    if (real == NULL)
        real = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "statvfs64");

    int ret = real(path, buf);
    buf->f_bfree = buf->f_blocks;
    buf->f_bavail = buf->f_blocks;
    return ret;
}

[Adel-Magebinary]

fakefree.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.

[tchebb]

@Adel-Magebinary You'll see that even if it's working properly, as Steam launches both 32-bit and 64-bit executables when it runs. fakefree.so needs to be 32-bit, as the main Steam executable (the one that needs to be tricked) is 32-bit. If it's not working for you, make sure you have a compiler that can cross-compile to 32-bit, and make sure that you pass it -m32 when you build the library.

You can verify that your library is 32-bit by running file fakefree.so. The output should be something like

fakefree.so: ELF 32-bit LSB pie executable Intel 80386 ...

[burjui]

I wonder what can I do on Windows to work around this bug. I installed Windows specifically for Rainbow Six: Siege, which is now 70 GB in size, and my SSD is only 256 GB. Since I have a Russian version of the game, which I didn't ask for (I live in Kaliningrad and play on EU servers anyway), but was forced to use by Steam, for every "new operation" update I have to add English sound files and fix some ini files. After Operation Grim Sky landed, I did this again. This time voices stayed Russian, despite everything I did to change it to English.

I tried reinstalling the game with existing files, but Steam tells me that I can't do that, because I only have 300 MB of free space. But I have all the files, why should I need any free space to do that? So now I have to delete some other useful stuff to just reinstall the game. Thanks Valve for keeping me occupied.

Pretty please fix the damn bug already

[ijurisic]

I try fakefree.c fix:

LD_PRELOAD=fakefree.so steam ERROR: ld.so: object 'fakefree.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object 'fakefree.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored. Running Steam on debian 9 64-bit STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically Pins up-to-date! [2018-09-10 19:30:05] Startup - updater built Aug 29 2018 20:06:41 [2018-09-10 19:30:05] Verifying installation... [2018-09-10 19:30:05] Verification complete html_chrome.cpp (394) : Assertion Failed: CefCrashReportingEnabled()

[2018-09-10 19:30:16] Shutdown

I check fakefree.so with:

file fakefree.so fakefree.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=f50e19eb6dc0c58bf7e63d67b770b13266f1b18d, not stripped

ldd fakefree.so linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f94000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf7f69000) libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf7db2000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f96000)

All looks normal but can't assertion of code. Any idea how to fix?

[tchebb]

LD_PRELOAD needs to contain the full (absolute) path to fakefree.so, otherwise the loader won't be able to find it.

[ijurisic]

Thanks, but now have error:

LD_PRELOAD=/home/ijurisic/Downloads/fakefree.so steam ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/ijurisic/Downloads/fakefree.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/ijurisic/Downloads/fakefree.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored. Running Steam on debian 9 64-bit STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically Pins up-to-date! [2018-09-10 22:23:43] Startup - updater built Aug 29 2018 20:06:41 [2018-09-10 22:23:43] Verifying installation... [2018-09-10 22:23:43] Verification complete html_chrome.cpp (394) : Assertion Failed: CefCrashReportingEnabled()

ok I re-compile without -m32 I got result:

LD_PRELOAD=/home/ijurisic/Downloads/fakefree.so steam ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/ijurisic/Downloads/fakefree.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/ijurisic/Downloads/fakefree.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored. Running Steam on debian 9 64-bit STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically Pins up-to-date! [2018-09-10 22:38:08] Startup - updater built Aug 29 2018 20:06:41 [2018-09-10 22:38:08] Verifying installation... [2018-09-10 22:38:08] Verification complete html_chrome.cpp (394) : Assertion Failed: CefCrashReportingEnabled()

[tchebb]

@ijurisic You definitely want to compile with -m32. The "wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32" error is expected and can be safely ignored. Is Steam starting after printing those log messages? If so, you should be fine; try installing a game. If not, please verify that it starts properly without LD_PRELOAD. If it still crashes, try rebooting or logging out—when I was developing the workaround, I somehow got Steam into a state where it wouldn't start at all, and rebooting fixed it.

[ryao]

@tchebb I don't like how you handled this in your wrapper. I am not in a position to test, but I think something like this would work better:

/*
 * Intercept calls to statvfs64(), which is used by Steam to determine
 * free disk space, and indicate that all space is available. This is
 * needed to work around the fact that Steam checks available disk space
 * before it checks for existing files.
 *
 * Please ONLY use this preload when you need it to install a game, then
 * relaunch Steam without it so that disk space detection works again.
 *
 * To compile:
 *   gcc -shared -fPIC -m32 -o fakefree.so fakefree.c -ldl
 *
 * To use (after ensuring Steam is not running):
 *   LD_PRELOAD=<path-to-fakefree.so> steam
 *
 * This code is Public Domain.
 */
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <limits.h>
#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <sys/statvfs.h>

void limitField(fsfilcnt64_t *field, fsfilcnt64_t size)
{
        if (*field * size > (((fsfilcnt64_t)INT_MAX) << 9)) {
                *field = (((fsfilcnt64_t)INT_MAX) << 9) / size;
        }
}

int statvfs64(const char *path, struct statvfs64 *buf)
{
        static int (*real)(const char *, struct statvfs64 *) = NULL;
        if (real == NULL)
                real = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "statvfs64");

        int ret = real(path, buf);

        limitField(&buf->f_bfree, buf->f_frsize);
        limitField(&buf->f_bavail, buf->f_frsize);

        return ret;
}

It might need a limitField(&buf->f_blocks, buf->f_frsize); line too. The idea being to limit the fields to a 2TB volume size, which is the largest that we can represent with a 32-bit signed integer and a sector size of 512-bytes. The data in #4982 suggests that Steam is trying to emulate that internally.

[Francesco149]

@ryao you need to clear errno and ret to 0 because the stat call can return errno 75 and steam will bail out. other than that, INT_MAX << 9 seems to be a good value and it's working for me so far

[rayza]

This bug is still a thing and quite annoying! Please do the disk space check after you checked for existing files! Ideally even after finding out how much additional space needs to be allocated.

[Managor]

This should get fixed I recorded a demonstrative video before noticing that there already exists a report for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZxCIAs5VwI

[MasterCATZ]

so what is the current permanent fix for doing this ?

over 20tb free and steam still thinks it has no space to install on Linux I have no been able to install any new games for a year now

can someone just hard code a toggle switch into steam to allow installer to ignore reported space ?

someone closed the other 0 byte issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5742

[burjui]

Come on, nobody's gonna fix this, the issue is more than 6 years old. This is how capitalism works: if money are flowing, nobody cares about the customer.

[MasterCATZ]

they would make more $ if I could install more .. especially during all this covid oh well I will just keep sniping all the cheap key codes when they pop up and add to collection

all steam seems to pay attention to is free space under home folder

[burjui]

The vast majority of people don't have the problem, so why spend time solving it? That's the logic they use, so don't get your hopes too high.

[MasterCATZ]

how ever I can no longer install anything again because the fake 2tb was all used up what other idea's are their ? I thought this would fake 2tb free space remaining but it fakes a 2tb volume size that steam then virtually fills up