Direct Storage

[ianmozzy]

Hello
I have been trying to find out how primocache works with direct storage.
I searched and found a few posts from about a year ago which had little useful information.

My main computer is dual boot windows/linux.
Windows is only used for gaming. Presently windows 10 but may be upgrading to 11.

Primocache is presently used to cache game files locally.

Games are becoming much larger. When unreal engine 5 games are out, will probably be very big.

So storing the games on slower drives using a cache is the cost effective option for me.
The question is - does primocache work well using direct storage and L2 cache data?


I have an old machine as a server, specifically proxmox. On there is a truenas virtual machine.
The plan is to down the track store games on a very large sparse ISCSI drive and use primocache as block store cache software.
Of course it is only useful if it supports direct storage in the long term.

Is there any useful information on this?

Thanks

[Support]

The question is - does primocache work well using direct storage and L2 cache data?

I'm sorry but we haven't tested Direct Storage yet. In principle, PrimoCache should work with Direct Storage without the need of change.

[xxbbfknightxx]

it will not work.

PrimoCache PREVENTS direct storage due to error "BypassIO not supported due to drier: FancyCcV.sys"
FancyCcV.sys is primocache.

[Hodor]

The question is - does primocache work well using direct storage and L2 cache data?

I'm sorry but we haven't tested Direct Storage yet. In principle, PrimoCache should work with Direct Storage without the need of change.

Hello,

The DirectStorage API works fine with PrimoCache. But the new BypassIO feature built into Win11 is still unsupported by the driver.

If you type the below command into CMD/Powershell then you'll get the following output:

PS C:\> fsutil bypassIo state c:
BypassIo on "C:\" is not currently supported
Status: 494 (The specified driver does not support BypassIO operations)
Driver: FancyCcV.sys
Reason: The driver's StorageSupportedFeatures registry value is not defined
Storage Type: NVMe
Storage Driver: Not BypassIo Compatible
PS C:\>

It's possible to enable this manually in regedit by going to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\FancyCcV\Parameters and adding DWORD StorageSupportedFeatures and setting it to 1. This does solve the above error but I think it would be nice to have official support in PrimoCache. I've no idea if this 'fix' could cause issues.

Here's the MS page on this:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... operations

[shingo501]

Do we have any update on this issue?

[Support]

We will fix it in the next release. Thanks.

[vlbastos]

We will fix it in the next release. Thanks.

That's great news! If possible, could you tell if this DirectStorage support will support RAID-0 volumes made with Intel RST too? Recently, Intel released new RST drivers with DirectStorage support, and Microsoft added RAID-0 support in DirectStorage 1.1 (which is only available in Windows 11 22H2).

[DonMigs85]

Is there a timeline for the next release? Last one was over a year ago.

[Support]

It's planned to come out in Q1 this year, thanks.