Steam
Quirks
32-bit application under FEX
FEX is a 64bit AArch64 application. To get 32-bit applications like Steam running under FEX there we workarounds in place to get them working without kernel patches.
This involves a userspace virtual memory allocator and ioctl emulation. Ideally we have kernel patches in place to have full coverage of ioctls but those patches are difficult to land upstream.
There is an ongoing effort to upstream these kernel bits but the ARM kernel maintainers really don't want to support this use case. For more information about the problems we encounter. https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/wiki/32Bit-x86-Woes
Launching steam
Without binfmt_misc installed you can do a `FEXBash steam` to get it running. With binfmt_misc installed you should be able to execute the steam bash script directly.
Setting environment variable STEAMOS and STEAM_RUNTIME
- export STEAMOS=1
- export STEAM_RUNTIME=1
Setting these environment variables skips Steam's bash script from checking for glibc and throwing a warning window
Problems/Workarounds
Steam is a very complex application which can cause FEX some pain. The primary application is also a 32bit binary which requires kernel patches to run on AArch64 platforms.
Game Library and other things not visible
Steam is using CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) for large amounts of its library rendering
This is currently broken under FEX but there are plans to fix it
Known bits that use CEF
- Game Library (Switch over to Small Mode or Big Picture mode in the menu)
- Friends List
- Game properties window
- Storefront and other web views
Steam crashing on startup
If steam has updated its runtime then it may have updated its pinned libraries and broke itself
Going in to the runtime and deleting some libraries can help here. These live in $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ Delete the following files from that folder and it can help
- rm $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++*
- rm $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb*
CEF crashing on startup
You may find messages in the steam log saying that steamwebhelper has failed to find symbols.
You may need to remove some libraries from the steam-runtime to get past this point.
This will let the steamwebhelper to use libraries from the rootfs instead of the steam-runtime
- rm $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so*
- rm $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6*
- rm $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfontconfig.so.1*
- rm $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdbus-1.so*
Long load times
Steam's load time can take a couple minutes. This is due to x87 utilization during initialization which is particularly slow. This will take some time to optimize. It can look like Steam has hung while loading. Might be worth watching the process in something like htop to watch if it crashed or is running.
Additionally it launches a few applications in the background that searches for things which can be a bit slow.