linux-steam-integration

Linux Steam Integration is a software package aimed squarely at Linux distribution developers. It is designed to offer a far better Steam* experience than the stock client, doing away with old integration issues and crashes.

Native Libraries

LSI enforces the use of host-native libraries, both in the Steam Client (via lsi-intercept) and games themselves. This ensures Steam integrates properly, games run with the latest libraries and users get the best performance.

Currently the officially provided Steam runtime is based on very old Ubuntu 12.04 packages, and has some cherry-picked updates (SDL, for example). This causes lots of integration issues on most newer distributions, such as broken client behaviour with full screen videos, outright crashes on startup, mismatched C++ ABI, missing sound, ugly menus, broken font rendering, poor performance, etc.

In a nut shell, LSI will force most of Steam over to using native libraries. The intercept system is new as of 0.4, and will be extended in future to allow improving certain games on a process-name whitelisting basis.

Configurable

You can easily toggle the use of the native runtime or the runtime provided with the official Steam package distribution. LSI doesn't butcher any files, so your local Steam directory does not need to be repaired or reinstalled. Just run lsi-settings and restart Steam.

Currently you can control whether the native runtime is used, force 32-bit mode for some troublesome ports, and control whether the intercept library is enabled (which will undo the various library mangling tricks of the Steam distribution to force the usage of the system libs via rtld-audit)

Portable

You can (and should) stick this into any distro. Hit us up if you need help integrating, or need some portability changes made. We won't bite.

Going beyond LSI

LSI solves a great many issues, however there is then still a responsibility for the integrating distribution to provide basic ABI compatibility, as well as being functionally comparable to the "stock" runtime. Our future plans will basically involve creating a project based around LSI and a specially produced, optimised Steam runtime, usable on all Linux distributions.

If you want to be part of that effort - and help bring a modern, optimised gaming experience to your Linux users, please get in contact. Let's do this once, and do it right.

We're not them.

This project, and by extension Solus, is not officially endorsed by, or affiliated with, Steam*, or its parent company, Valve*.

Linux Steam Integration is a Solus project

Getting LSI

LSI may not yet be available for your distribution, however some community maintained repositories do exist.

• Arch Linux
• Fedora
• Solus uses LSI by default, just install the steam package.

Integrating LSI

To correctly integrate LSI, your Steam package will require modification. LSI must provide the /usr/bin/steam binary, so your Steam package must move the main launcher to a shadow location.

For users who do not have access to LSI in their distribution, because it has not been integrated yet, please configure with -Dwith-shim=co-exist to preserve your existing Steam integrity. Then use the "LSI Steam" shortcut in your menu to launch Steam via LSI.

Configuring LSI build

There are a number of meson configure options you should be aware of when integrating LSI correctly. The prominent ones are explained here.

-Dwith-shim= none | co-exist | replacement

    Control behaviour of the shim build. `none` will disable building the main
    shim, required for actually launching Steam in the first place.
    
    `co-exist` will ensure this does not conflict with the `/usr/bin/steam`
    path, providing a new `lsi-steam` binary and desktop file.

    `replacement` will provide a drop-in replacement `/usr/bin/steam` binary
    shim responsible for bootstrapping Steam via LSI. This will require you
    to mask the original steam binary to a new location.

    The default value for this option is::

            replacement

-Dwith-steam-binary=$PATH

    Set the absolute path for the shadowed Steam binary.
    LSI will execv Steam after it has initialised the environment.
    Note that execv, not execvp, is used, to mask programs that may be
    in the `$PATH`, hence requiring an absolute path.

    The default value for this option is:

            /usr/lib/steam/steam

    This option is only applicable for distribution integrators, when
    Steam replacement is enabled.

-Dwith-preload-libs=$LIBS

    A colon separated list of libraries that are required to launch Steam
    when using its own runtime. LSI enables users to switch back to the Steam
    runtime, and in this instance we manage the LD_PRELOAD environmental variable.
    Ensure this is correct, and escape $LIB for correct Linux usage.

    The default value for this option is:

            /usr/\$LIB/libX11.so.6:/usr/\$LIB/libstdc++.so.6

-Dwith-new-libcxx-abi=$boolean

    Enable this if your distribution uses a recent libstdc++ build, from
    GCC 6 or higher.

-Dwith-frontend=$boolean

    A small UI application is shipped to enable configuration of LSI, which presents
    a simple GTK3 Dialog to the user. It is not enabled by default, it is up
    to the integrator to decide if they wish to employ lsi-settings, or implement
    an alternative.

    The lsi-settings application will only ever write new configurations to the
    **user** settings file, and requires no special permissions.

    The default value for this option is:

            false

How LSI Works

LSI provides a /usr/bin/steam binary to be used in place of the existing Steam script, which will then correctly set up the environment before swapping the process for the Steam process. When using a full build of LSI, the bootstrap shim will force a correct environment, removing any issues that can cause various older SDL versions to kill Steam. Additionally it will then force STEAM_RUNTIME=0 if this is set in the config (default behaviour).

When using the native runtime, and the intercept library is enabled, the LSI shim will also set up LD_AUDIT to use liblsi-intercept. This library will intercept all dynamic linking operations for the main Steam binaries and override their behaviour, allowing Steam to only load a handful of vendored libraries (libav fork) as well as its own private libraries. It is then forced to use system libraries for everything else. This means the Steam client, web helper, etc, will use the native SDL, X11, fixing many bugs with video playback, font rendering and such.

If you are packaging LSI for a distribution, please ensure you provide both a 32-bit and 64-bit build of the intercept library so that the entirety of Steam's library (.so) mechanism is tightly controlled by LSI. See the scripts in the root directory of this repository for examples of how to do this.

Configuration options can be placed in an INI-style configuration file in a series of locations, which are ordered by priority in a cascade::

    ~/.config/linux-steam-integration.conf
    /etc/linux-steam-integration.conf
    /usr/share/defaults/linux-steam-integration/linux-steam-integration.conf

The user configuration takes immediate priority. Secondly we have the system-wide configuration for affecting all accounts, and lastly the vendor configuration, which may be provided by the integrator.

Currently this INI file supports three options. The root section in this INI file must be [Steam].

use-native-runtime = $boolean

    If set to a true boolean value, (yes/true/on), the host OS's native runtime
    will be used instead of the Steam provided runtime. If this is set to
    a false boolean value (no/false/off), then the startup will be modified
    to export the relevant `LD_PRELOAD` and `STEAM_RUNTIME` settings.

    The default value of this variable is true.

force-32bit = $boolean

    If set to a true boolean value (yes/true/on), the shadowed Steam binary will
    be run via the `linux32` command. This will force the `steam` process
    and all children to believe they are running on a 32-bit system. This
    may be useful for 64-bit games that are buggy only on 64-bit.

    If this is set to a false boolean value (no/false/off), then the
    shadowed Steam binary will be directly executed. Note that on 32-bit
    OSs this setting is ignored.

    The default value of this variable is false.

use-libintercept = $boolean

    If set to a true boolean value (yes/true/on), the `liblsi-intercept.so`
    library will be utilised to control dynamic linking within the Steam client
    and associated processes.

    Note this requires `use-native-runtime` to be set.

    The default value of this variable is true.

Common issues

Virtually all issues will come down to having the right dependencies. LSI puts an emphasis on host-first libraries, so make sure all the correct libraries are available for both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Steam has both 32-bit and 64-bit processes/libraries, having the full dependency set for both the client and common games/engines is a must.

Missing tray icon for Steam client using native OS runtime

Ensure you have the 32-bit version of libappindicator installed. This is required for the tray icon. libappindicator falls back to a standard X11 tray icon in the absence of desktop appindicator support.

Related issue: Steam tray icon missing #2

Steam fails to launch with libintercept/native-runtime

Make sure you enable full debugging when first assigning dependencies to your runtime package:

$ LSI_DEBUG=1 steam
# If you use co-exist option:
$ LSI_DEBUG=1 lsi-steam

liblsi-intercept regressing performance

There exists a bug in glibc which incorrectly configures profiling for all PLT calls when using LD_AUDIT (rtld-audit) even if the audit library doesn't implement la_pltenter or la_pltexit. This leads to a performance hit on every runtime call via PLT.

The issue was first reported to this project by @amonakov here. The upstream glibc issue is reported on the upstream glibc bugzilla. A patch to resolve the issue was submitted by @amonakov here.

If you are noticing performance regressions, you can:

• As a user: Disable liblsi-intercept via lsi-settings. This will hurt compatibility.
• As a packager: Disable liblsi-intercept via build flags. This will hurt compatibility.
• As a distribution integrator: Add weight to upstream issue and import patch into your distribution. This will retain LSI compatibility magic and mitigate performance issues. As an example, Solus has already integrated the patch.

The long term solution is to remove this burden from non-Solus Linux distributions, and for the Solus & LSI projects to provide a specialised runtime & strict LSI build via third party mechanisms so that all this work only needs doing once. This will help ensure the same gaming experience regardless of Linux distribution, remove all compatibility issues, and any pressures on distributions. Additionally this will allow even distributions not supporting multilib to provide a curated and well integrated gaming runtime.

License

src/shim src/frontend src/lsi src/intercept:

    Copyright © 2016-2017 Ikey Doherty

    linux-steam-integration is available under the terms of the `LGPL-2.1`

data/lsi-steam.desktop:

    This file borrows translations from the official `steam.desktop` launcher.
    These are copyright of Valve*.

See LICENSE.LGPL2.1 <LICENSE.LGPL2.1>_ for more details

• Some names may be claimed as the property of others.