Igalia detail their open source work for Valve's Steam Frame and Steam Machine

One of the great things about Valve's hardware is that it's not locked down, and they put a lot of money into open source for SteamOS (Linux). With the upcoming new Steam Machine and Steam Frame, the open source never stops.

And here we have Igalia, one of the Free Software consultancies that Valve works with, writing up a post detailing some of the work that goes into it all. In this case, it's especially interesting for the Steam Frame. Igalia have people working on FEX, as just one example, which is a fast usermode x86 and x86-64 emulator for Arm64 Linux. Basically, it allows running x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices - this is part of how the Steam Frame will actually run games. From the post:

“If you love video games, like I do, working on FEX with Valve is a dream come true,” said Paulo Matos, an engineer with Igalia’s Compilers Team. Even so, the challenges can be daunting, because making sure the translation is working often requires manual QA rather than automated testing. “You have to start a game, sometimes the error shows up in the colors or sound, or how the game behaves when you break down the door in the second level. Just debugging this can take a while,” said Matos. “For optimization work I did early last year, I used a game called Psychonauts to test it. I must have played the first 3 to 4 minutes of the game many, many times for debugging. Looking at my history, Steam tells me I played it for 29 hours, but it was always the first few minutes, nothing else.”

I imagine there's a lot of driver development, and Proton / Wine development, that has people repeat sections over and over like this. Can't imagine how boring that actually ends up. But, probably exciting when they finally nail it and get it all working nicely.

The post from Igalia also confirms the Steam Frame will use the open source Mesa3D Turnip graphics driver, which needed a fair amount of work to be ready for the device by the sounds of it, with lots missing to get it up to scratch. More from the post:

“We implemented many Vulkan extensions and reviewed numerous others,” said Danylo Piliaiev, an engineer on the Graphics Team. “Over the years, we ensured that D3D11, D3D12, and OpenGL games rendered correctly through DXVK, vkd3d-proton, and Zink, investigating many rendering issues along the way. We achieved higher correctness than the proprietary driver and, in many cases, Mesa3D Turnip is faster as well.”

Since it's all open source, everyone benefits - not just Valve. And, some of the work sounds quite exciting for the future of gaming on Linux. More from the post:

Looking ahead, Igalia’s work for Valve will continue to deliver benefits to the wider Linux Gaming ecosystem. For example, the Steam Frame, as a battery-powered VR headset, needs to deliver high performance within a limited power budget. A way to address this is to create a more efficient task scheduler, which is something Changwoo Min of Igalia’s Kernel Team has been working on. As he says, “I have been developing a customized CPU scheduler for gaming, named LAVD: Latency-criticality Aware Virtual Deadline scheduler.”

Read more in the Igalia post. They also have multiple jobs open for programmers interested.