Explore Steam Deck issues in openSUSE Tumbleweed
a project by tschmitz
Updated over 2 years ago. 6 hacker ♥️. 3 followers.

Project Description

The Steam Deck is a portable gaming handheld built around platform technology similar to the one found in AMD mobile laptops. Vendor Valve ships a custom Linux distribution with downstream patches on this device, but booting into other distributions is possible. Connecting the Steam Deck to a dock can turn it into a compact workstation.

While a lot of patches have been upstreamed or rewritten for upstream, some upstream-only issues persist. Archlinux users work around this by just using Valve's downstream versions which is not the route I would like to take.

I already had a chance to explore these issues last year and got a lot of help from cool developers such as tiwai. But I did not get as far as I would have liked. I want to revisit these issues and learn more about kernel work. As a kernel newbie I am looking forward to learning more.

I appreciate help, pointers, tips and tricks from experienced maintainers. Kernel newbies such as myself are also very welcome to join, too. Some open issues already contain commands that you can use to collect information and help you learn, so make sure to take a look at the existing Bugzilla reports.

Goal for this Hackweek

  • retest known issues with the latest Tumbleweed snapshot
  • figure out how to collect useful information and research around drivers
  • revive these open issues and hopefully come closer to finding a solution
  • learn a bunch about the kernel, drivers and debugging (probably mostly ALSA ASoC, DRM, x86_64 ACPI)
  • try patching the Tumbleweed kernel and see what happens
  • write a small blog post about how it went including some photos

Resources

  • Currently open issues: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=steam+deck
  • Valve hosts their source code as src.tar.gz containing bare git repos: https://steamdeck-packages.steamos.cloud/archlinux-mirror/sources/jupiter-main/

Join this project

Looking for hackers with the skills:

steam steamdeck kernel drivers

This project is part of:

Hack Week 22

Activity

  • over 2 years ago: okurz liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: nkrapp liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tjyrinki_suse liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: dfaggioli liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: dgedon liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: robert.richardson liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tschmitz started this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tschmitz added keyword "steam" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tschmitz added keyword "steamdeck" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tschmitz added keyword "kernel" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tschmitz added keyword "drivers" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tschmitz originated this project.


    • Comments

    • tschmitz
      over 2 years ago by tschmitz | Reply

      bugzilla#1202570 I cannot say much about since I do not understand all existing power states. Suspension works fine.

    • tschmitz
      over 2 years ago by tschmitz | Reply

      bugzilla#1202566 I cannot replicate on the kernel package from the main repo.

    Similar Projects

    early stage kdump support by mbrugger

    Project Description

    When we experience a early boot crash, we are not able to analyze the kernel dump, as user-space wasn't able to load the crash system. The idea is to make the crash system compiled into the host kernel (think of initramfs) so that we can create a kernel dump really early in the boot process.

    Goal for the Hackweeks

    1. Investigate if this is possible and the implications it would have (done in HW21)
    2. Hack up a PoC (done in HW22 and HW23)
    3. Prepare RFC series (giving it's only one week, we are entering wishful thinking territory here).

    update HW23

    • I was able to include the crash kernel into the kernel Image.
    • I'll need to find a way to load that from init/main.c:start_kernel() probably after kcsan_init()
    • I workaround for a smoke test was to hack kexec_file_load() systemcall which has two problems:
      1. My initramfs in the porduction kernel does not have a new enough kexec version, that's not a blocker but where the week ended
      2. As the crash kernel is part of init.data it will be already stale once I can call kexec_file_load() from user-space.

    The solution is probably to rewrite the POC so that the invocation can be done from init.text (that's my theory) but I'm not sure if I can reuse the kexec infrastructure in the kernel from there, which I rely on heavily.

    update HW24

    • Day1
      • rebased on v6.12 with no problems others then me breaking the config
      • setting up a new compilation and qemu/virtme env
      • getting desperate as nothing works that used to work
    • Day 2
      • getting to call the invocation of loading the early kernel from __init after kcsan_init()

    • Day 3

      • fix problem of memdup not being able to alloc so much memory... use 64K page sizes for now
      • code refactoring
      • I'm now able to load the crash kernel
      • When using virtme I can boot into the crash kernel, also it doesn't boot completely (major milestone!), crash in elfcorehdr_read_notes()

    • Day 4

      • crash systems crashes (no pun intended) in copy_old_mempage() link; will need to understand elfcorehdr...
      • call path vmcore_init() -> parse_crash_elf_headers() -> elfcorehdr_read() -> read_from_oldmem() -> copy_oldmem_page() -> copy_to_iter()

    • Day 5

      • hacking arch/arm64/kernel/crash_dump.c:copy_old_mempage() to see if crash system really starts. It does.
      • fun fact: retested with more reserved memory and with UEFI FW, host kernel crashes in init but directly starts the crash kernel, so it works (somehow) \o/

    • TODOs

      • fix elfcorehdr so that we actually can make use of all this...
      • test where in the boot __init() chain we can/should call kexec_early_dump()