Hi, I am one of the maintainer of BlissOS, the custom Android OS for x86 hardware. We have a build that include the latest stable kernel (6.6.x) and a contributor told me that it should not be installed on the Steam Deck with eMMC storage. I ask why and the contributor sent me the Bazzite README which have this warning :
“Due to an upstream bug, Bazzite cannot be used on Steam Decks with 64GB eMMC storage at this time.”
May I ask, what is this particular bug ? Is it being reported anywhere yet ? I don’t want users to be affected so I want to get some info about this to send a warning. I hope I can get some info about this.
In our testing across multiple 64gb Steam Decks, we found that that the eMMC was susceptible to data corruption immediately following installation to the point where the device flat out doesn’t boot and recovery isn’t possible. As far as the source of this bug, we have yet to find it. All we know is that using an SSD in its place completely mitigates this problem. Whether it has to do with the kernel, file system, or is just something somehow specific to ostree, I couldn’t tell you
Here’s my experience with using it. I also can’t pinpoint an exact reason why this only happens with the 64GB eMMC drive that’s in that particular Steam Deck.
ChimeraOS on my 64GB deck was fine when I tested it back in July. None of the issues that manifested from Bazzite were present. So maybe this is something to do with OCI/OSTree. We can confirm the issues with Bazzite also happen on Universal Blue images (like our main Fedora Silverblue images.)
I also faced this issue, but with GNU Guix. I got frequent filesystem corruptions after a few days of usage and even using different filesystems like ext4, xfs or btrfs didn’t have any effect on the issue. I think it might either be related to some kernel patch present in the SteamOS kernel or some kernel config that might be causing the issue as using SteamOS doesn’t give me any errors at all.
I intend to try installing normal Fedora with the upstream kernel to see if I can recreate the issue.
Your speculation is also what we have been speculating recently. It may have been due to Valve’s kernel patch for the NVME driver. We can also confirm this happens with Fedora Workstation too. It seems this is up to Valve to have this patch updated for newer kernels. We’re watching when SteamOS updates the kernel to 6.5 or later, and I plan to test my stock 64GB deck again with Bazzite to see if the same issues occur.
I can confirm that I encountered this bug as well on ChromeOS. I removed the module from the 64GB Steam Deck and installed it in a cheap tablet with an M.2 slot. After installing ChromeOS via Brunch, the file system was corrupted after the third reboot.
