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ValveSoftware / steam-for-linux

Issue tracking for the Steam for Linux beta client
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[feature request] Support loading games into /dev/shm similar to dimmdrive #3583

Open boombatower opened 9 years ago

boombatower commented 9 years ago

Would be really slick if this was built in to steam for folks with ever increasing amounts of ram could take advantage of it. Could obviously be done on windows too. Not an overly difficult feature to support for linux since just a copy command with possibly rsync or similar if wanting to support syncing back and only loading whole game if enough space. Down the road could add option to select specific files as dimmdrive supports.

grinapo commented 1 year ago

I strongly suggest not to.

You can pull up any ram backed cache (lvmcache/bcache/flashcace, though you would see little to none speedup in real life), or even pull up a real ramdisk (either tmpfs or a brd backed image) and copy directories there, but stay away from /dev/shm. Not just for the reason that it is going to end up on your disk swap partition anyway, but as such it would require way more disk IO to handle than a normal file-backed caching.

If you have seas of ram you could create a simple script to pull up a ramdisk, copy&symlink steamapps dir there then start the client.