[Bug 6297] Half life 2 based games occasionally do not start due to registry in use

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6297

--- Comment #32 from Stefan Dösinger   2007-12-05 17:41:22 ---
As I said, this is a difference in Linux's and Windows write cache behavior.
Steam expects a different timing when writing huge files onto the disk. You can
either fix that in steam(Call sync() or something), or change the Linux kernel
settings to mimic Windows' caching behavior.

On Windows this bug pops up usually with system tuners which do exactly this:
Change the caching settings.

To change the Linux behavior, you can either set the sync flag on the directory
on filesystems that support it, or you can try to modify the VM settings of the
kernel. For example, try to set /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs and
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs to 1. This will essentially put *all*
your files into sync mode.