The manifest now declares the app a game (appCategory, isGame) with a game_mode_config that
welcomes Performance mode and refuses the OS-side FPS cap and resolution downgrade — the
interventions that make a regular flagship's Big Picture crawl while a gaming phone's does not.
The session window asks for sustained performance mode and the panel's fastest mode at its size,
tells GameManager it is in gameplay, and opens a PerformanceHintManager session over the
compositor thread fed with each presented frame's interval against the panel's period. All
version-guarded (6/7/12/13); the session log carries one 'perf:' line saying what took.
The app's own libraries link with 16 KB-aligned LOAD segments (loads unchanged on 4 KB kernels).
Six prebuilt PulseAudio libraries under jniLibs are still 4 KB-only and need a rebuild.
Two events the log was silent about, both of which a report needed this week.
A window that changes the size of the frames it commits has rebuilt its
swapchain, and that is what a game suddenly filling one corner of the screen
looks like from the compositor's side: FlatOut came back from the Steam menu in
a smaller swapchain and the log said nothing at all, so the size had to be
inferred from a screenshot. It now says both sizes on the line.
And a window already on screen being renamed is something else taking it over:
gamescope keeps one toplevel and retitles it as the game takes the screen. That
was silent, which left the log showing a window "closed" under a name it had
never been logged as opening - reading like a missing event when it was really
a rename. Both are rare by nature; there is nothing to rate-limit.
A session used to leave a loose session-<stamp>.log in Download/SteamDeck and
a compositor log in a different folder entirely, with Steam's own logs copied
beside the first one only if the session exited cleanly - which the sessions
worth reading never do. Reports arrived needing three questions answered
before anything could be read: what device, which drivers, which settings.
Now each session claims Download/SteamDeck/session-<stamp>/ and everything
lands in it: device.txt, session.log, wayland.log, steam.log plus steam/ in
Steam mode, desktop.log in desktop mode. The folder is claimed by whoever
starts first, since the activity starts the compositor before the service
starts the session, and the compositor is told where to write through its
environment - it opens that file once, so the service also copies it in at
teardown, which covers the second and later sessions of one process.
device.txt is written before the session starts, so a session that dies in its
first second still says what it ran on: model, SoC, Android, kernel, cores and
ceilings, RAM, the GPU as KGSL names it, the panel, the driver each half of the
session chose, the runtime version, every switch in effect, and whether Android
is set to kill the session's child processes.
Nothing identifying is collected - no serial, no device or advertising id, no
account name, no network names - and Steam's logs are scrubbed line by line on
the way in, with Bannerlator's patterns: session tokens (including the bare
numeric "Using JWT" form), machine-auth GUIDs, WebAPI keys, Guard codes,
emails, and SteamIDs masked to their last four digits so lines still correlate.
loginusers.vdf, config.vdf and the ssfn files are never copied.
Also from Max: a switch to run proot without its seccomp acceleration
(PROOT_NO_SECCOMP=1), for kernels that handle that filter badly - ENOSYS from
calls that plainly exist is the signature, which is what the Fold's storm looks
like; and the phantom-process warning above, which is his "your OS killed it".
labwc's Wayland backend, configured with 0x0, opened wlroots' default
1280x720 window and the whole desktop was upscaled from it - the r29 and r30
logs both show the output at 1280x720 whatever rc.xml and wlr-randr asked.
The configure now carries the output's size; gamescope is told the same
numbers on its command line, so nothing changes for the Steam client.
From Bannerlator's feat/linux-gamescope-runtime since this repo was cut:
- Session teardown (4509d788): proot was SIGKILLed, which never lets its
--kill-on-exit cleanup run; its tracees lived on with no tracer, every
seccomp-trapped syscall failing with ENOSYS, spinning at a full core for over
an hour. Now SIGTERM, a grace for proot's own cleanup, SIGKILL only if it
will not go, then a sweep of the tree it had — snapshotted first, each pid
checked against its start time.
- The Steam client's controller interposer is its own source
(fakeinput_steam.cpp, 28922e7c), separate from the one preloaded into Wine.
- The seeder runs on a beat so a prefix the client creates mid-session is
covered before its install scripts run (6ee86bff).
- GE-Proton and proton-cachyos as compatibility tools: the registrar
bannerlator-proton-extra and the compat script's adopt_extras (03867656).
- space.c in the session shim: a library's own free space, not the phone's.
The env-vs-args ordering bug (98d38931) does not apply here: nothing is added
after the script name.
The compositor was built with its frame-generation leg stubbed out. Bannerlator's
two engines and the DXBC translator they need now ride along, so extra frames
are generated on gamescope's final output — any game, nothing changed in the
runtime. Win-FG needs nothing; LSFG takes its shader chain from the user's own
Lossless Scaling, which in this app is installed from the Steam client and read
straight out of the runtime's library. One picker on the main screen: Off, or an
engine at 2x/3x/4x, applied live on the next return to the session.
The compositor lives for the whole process, so the second Play after a session
had ended re-attached the Surface, started nothing, and left the loading panel
counting up over a dead session — it looked like a login that never came. The
service now starts whenever no session is running; the compositor's one-shot
first-frame notice is re-armed for the new session, or the panel would never
leave; and whatever the previous session left behind (gamescopereaper, the
session script, a dead client's helpers, the audio server) is killed first,
since it is our uid and still holds the socket the new one needs.
The session now belongs to a foreground service rather than the activity.
Android demotes a process as soon as its last visible activity goes and the
low-memory killer reaps the guest, so leaving Big Picture to answer a message
came back to a dead Steam; the service holds the process at perceptible
priority, a partial wake lock keeps the CPU from dropping the guest's threads,
and a high-performance WiFi lock keeps a backgrounded download from being
throttled to nothing. The notification is silent (IMPORTANCE_LOW), carries a
Stop action, and returns to the session when tapped. Back now puts the app away
and leaves Steam running; a swipe out of recents ends the session.
The compositor moved with it: it is process-wide, started once, and merely
swaps the Surface it presents into as the activity comes and goes.
Package is com.steamdeck.launcher, signed with the AOSP testkey (v1+v2+v3) so
every build installs over the last one, and CI asserts all three schemes.
The launcher icon is our own controller on a purple glow — the spirit of the
Steam tile the client entry uses, none of its geometry.
Lifts Bannerlator's Linux/gamescope runtime out into an app of its own: the
Wayland compositor, the proot session, the runtime installer, the fake-evdev
controller path and the PulseAudio server, with none of the Wine, container or
store machinery around them.
One activity installs the runtime from the same winlator-contents catalog and a
second one runs the session: compositor on a SurfaceView, gamescope and Valve's
native arm64 client under proot, a physical pad republished into the fake-input
rings, and the session's milestones on screen until the first frame arrives.
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