Hey, I'm CryoByte33, or Kyle. I run a YouTube channel that uses my 18 years of Linux experience, and experience as a DevOps Engineer for my day job to help people play the games they love on their Decks!
I haven't heard an instance of this happening, but if something happens PLEASE open an issue here.
Unfortunately, no. Windows doesn't allow tuning things this close to the kernel, with the exception of page file size, which is configurable through a GUI inside Windows.
No, this doesn't directly affect either the fan speeds or battery life, but it could lift a bottleneck and allow the CPU and GPU to work harder, thus raising fan speeds or lowering battery life by technicality.
Not that I'm aware of. At worst, performance breaks even.
No, but reformatting the Deck will revert it. I tested with several updates and all tweaks were left in place. In the event that an update does revert some settings, I will do my best to update the community about it and give you steps if necessary.
Please check out my video on YouTube to get an explanation of everything!
Any game that uses a combined 16GB for RAM and VRAM will likely benefit from the swap fix in some way. How much the swap fix helps will depend on a few factors including asset compression, asset size, and churn of data in memory.
Yes, they work for any program on SteamOS loaded from any location. That means that even Google Chrome installed on an external hard drive would benefit from these changes (If the trigger conditions are met).
No, as long as swappiness is also tuned properly.
No, even Yuzu and Cemu have benefited from these fixes, and I hope to test more emulators soon.
No, using a lower swappiness will completely offset the additional writes from a larger swap file, and actually keep the SSD healthier for longer.
In general, a swappiness of 100 will try to put data into swap prior to RAM. Because of that, a large percentage of all memory operations would wear your SSD. I don't have a spare SSD to test this, but I would guess that the default wear pattern would reduce the SSD's life to about 4 years of average gameplay on modern games.
Setting the swappiness to 1 won't quite prevent data from making it into swap at all times, but it will reduce the frequency to only when the Deck overflows its total memory.
Yes, the read and write speeds both make a difference in the speed of swapping, and therefore performance. That said, Valve did a pretty good job at choosing good quality parts with relatively similar speeds so we'd all have a consistent experience.
In general, the larger the SSD the faster it is, but there's a lot more to it than that. I plan to test the difference in speeds as soon as possible.
In general, you'll likely see much smoother gameplay. FPS averages may also be boosted in games where the CPU is the major bottleneck.
Not as far as I'm aware, since all of these are built into the Linux kernel and I'm just changing pre-existing values rather than adding or changing functionality.