GlouOSMemory and storage
A few well-chosen memory and storage defaults quietly remove some of the most common causes of stutter and crashes.
ZRAM instead of disk swap
GlouOS sets up ZRAM, a compressed swap area in RAM (roughly the size of your RAM, using zstd). It absorbs memory pressure far faster than swapping to disk, which keeps frame times steady when a game and its shader compiler are both hungry.
A raised memory-map count
One setting fixes a surprising number of "why does this game crash" reports:
vm.max_map_count = 2147483642Many modern games, especially through Proton and DXVK, need a very high memory-map limit. GlouOS raises it by default, so those titles simply run instead of crashing or stuttering.
Quieter memory management
Transparent huge pages are set to madvise, and memory compaction and reclaim are tuned down so the kernel does less disruptive housekeeping mid-game. The result is fewer of the tiny pauses that add up to a "not quite smooth" feeling.
Filesystem and I/O
GlouOS defaults to ext4 for reliability and offers Btrfs for its snapshots. Game drives are mounted to avoid needless writes (noatime), and the I/O scheduler is matched to your drive: a low-overhead one for NVMe, a fairer one for SATA and spinning disks.
On Btrfs, GlouOS also enables light zstd compression and asynchronous TRIM. Compression can actually speed up loads on slower drives because there is less to read, at almost no CPU cost, and async discard keeps SSD housekeeping off the critical path. Your game folders stay exempt from copy-on-write, so they never pay its overhead.
Steam libraries on Btrfs
If you keep a Steam library on Btrfs, GlouOS disables copy-on-write for that folder so its overhead does not slow game loads.