i would love this feature to be added
This has been partly implemented in Steam at some point since I posted this request, which i am very thankful for. On the same system (still OpenZFS), Steam now automatically no longer tries to reserve space. However, I do not know the situation for other filesystems and edge cases, and it might be worth including an option to disable reserving space regardless. For example, I have shared parts of my OpenZFS filesystem over NFS to my Steam Deck for it to use as an emergency external library (with admittedly high latency). My Steam Deck, however, sees this only as an NFS mount, and does not know that underlying it is a filesystem that would benefit from disabling space reservation. A toggle of some kind to override Steam's auto-detection would fix this, but is admittedly low-priority. Anyway, keep up the good work!
Still need this
I need this. my game library is on an SD card, and when preallocating space, it goes SOOO slow, and the entire client even starts lagging. Not to mention it's killing the write cycles...
Nothing extracted yet.
Your system information
tar -zcvf ~/Desktop/steam-logs.tar.gz ~/.steam/steam/logs]Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
In some more advanced Linux filesystems, or in certain cases, reserving space is pointless, as the filesystem will detect sequences of zeroes and transparently compress them. This happens at least in default OpenZFS, and optionally enabled on Btrfs and potentially other newer filesystems. ideally, when downloading games to a filesystem with this feature, Steam would automatically skip the "Reserving Space" step, otherwise, it might be good to set a toggle per library folder that the user can switch to skip this step. I'd say this is a low priority feature, but would be nice to have.
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