ps if you do this you owe me a frame lol

I haven't used bcache for a while, because it didn't add as much speed as I wanted (and it was quite buggy), and ssds became cheap anyway, but I'm pretty sure nothing stops you from formatting your sd card as backing and your nvme (probably without the root partition, and idk if it works for ext4, too) as cache.

i have bcache on my pc right now and directly tested the drives in games and in stress tests and it added considerable speed for me in line with documentation and other user tests, so i dont really know what you mean ive also not encountered any bugginess with it ive used it for many months or close to a year now without issues, i can see some people complaining about bugginess over 4 years ago with package regressions but nothing recent.

thats also less of a worry on steamos since its immutable and they can just not push broken packages. I think bcache is perfectly suitable for this and i obviously know its something doable on your own im recommending it because i think it would be useful for everyday people who dont know how to set up something like that since its entirely through a terminal on an immutable distro its not very beginner friendly. If the advertising is about running your library off SD card then some caching solution is really helpful and bcache is the most available as its filesystem agnostic.

They will not do it by default, because they would have to configure your SD card, which they do not have access to. It would also introduce considerable delay on first launches (or if you play more games), whenever the cache needs to populate, which would be very bad for a portable device (eg. you have a 30 min break at work, and you have to spend half of it filling cache instead of having a few seconds longer load screens).

they do have access to the sd card it connects to the device.... it could be as simple as asking if you would like to format the sd card with caching enabled so that games can be sped up and the user selects yes or no it doesnt necessarily need to be default

and idk who youre thinking of but most people arent playing portable vr at work, some might play desktop games like that but even then its not gonna be as common, and the same with a steam console, many people will be exclusively playing them at home. and the caching also just doesnt take 30 minutes like youre saying either, first time loads of certain larger files may be slightly slower but the cache significantly speeds up the game storage as soon as it notices that file being consistently loaded which can make a big difference for someone playing games in vr for a longer period like an hour or more it can improve frametimes noticably which is important for comfort

there also is not a significant delay either especially with writethrough specifically but what youre describing its just not some issue that is pertinent it never gets slower than the actual drive speed youre at worst getting average sd card speed in worst case scenarios

Firstly, idk why you started talking about VR out of nowhere.

Secondly, I'm pretty sure the on-the-go gaming is the main, or at least a significant, way of using steamos. And, while 30 minutes might be an exaggeration (it wasn't when I was using bcache a few years back), it's still not worth it for an on-the-go device.

Thirdly, it's not as easy as formatting the sd card. You have to partition format your SSD accordingly. And you also have to account for the reduced storage.

You can do it yourself, though, so I don't see where the problem is.

引用自 'Cus：

Since the steam machines seem like they're gonna support sd cards for extra storage,

Perhaps. The SSD drives are easy to upgrade. So if extra space is needed/desired, that would be the more appropriate way to add more storage space.