Linux Steam Games with XFS inode64 Issues

The steam versions of the following games may not run from an XFS filesystem with the inode64 option:

  • Borderlands 2
  • Divinity: Original Sin Extended Edition(?)
  • Europa Universalis IV
  • Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth
  • Sid Meier's Civilization V
  • Space Hulk
  • Space Hulk Ascension
  • Starcom
  • Stellaris
  • SteamWorld Heist

Possible workarounds are either moving the games to a steam library on a different filesystem like ext4, which is the default for many distributions, or to disable the inode64 mount option for XFS (which is a very bad idea!).

NFS mountd : Stale NFS file handle

Fucking opera crashed again while writing the article. Here the short version:

You try to mount an NFS export which resides on a  xfs file system and the client fails with the message "Stale NFS file handle". A more verbose mount may show these messages: 

mount.nfs: trying text-based options 'vers=3,addr=aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd'
mount.nfs: prog 100003, trying vers=3, prot=6
mount.nfs: trying aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd prog 100003 vers 3 prot TCP port 2049
mount.nfs: prog 100005, trying vers=3, prot=ddd
mount.nfs: trying aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd prog 100005 vers 3 prot UDP port 4002
mount.nfs: mount(2): Stale NFS file handle
mount.nfs: trying text-based options 'vers=3,addr=aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd'
mount.nfs: prog 100003, trying vers=3, prot=6
mount.nfs: trying aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd prog 100003 vers 3 prot TCP port 2049
mount.nfs: prog 100005, trying vers=3, prot=ddd
mount.nfs: trying aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd prog 100005 vers 3 prot UDP port 4002
mount.nfs: mount(2): Stale NFS file handle

The server syslog has entries like:

Sep 9 22:39:17 server rpc.mountd[11413]: authenticated mount request from aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:809 for /srv/file/xxx (/srv/file/xxx)
Sep 9 22:39:19 server rpc.mountd[11413]: authenticated mount request from aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:971 for /srv/file/xxx (/srv/file/xxx)
Sep 9 22:39:28 server rpc.mountd[11413]: authenticated mount request from aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:913 for /srv/file/xxx (/srv/file/xxx)
Sep 9 22:40:20 server rpc.mountd[11413]: authenticated mount request from aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:853 for /srv/file/xyz (/srv/file/xyz)

Before trying any stuff like turning off IPv6 or replacing portmapper with rpcbind as suggested by some folks, try changing the inode numbers of the exported directories as described in the mailing list entry "XFS, NFS and inode64 on 2.6.27" found via this forum entry.

To make this thing even more stupid, it is noted in the offical XFS FAQ, but in a way that you will not  find it if you run into this problem. Second penalty point for XFS (first one is inability to shrink).