Steam Deck Motion Sensors Being Worked On For Linux's HID-Steam Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 22 April 2024 at 10:04 AM EDT. 11 Comments
VALVE
A patch is undergoing work to add Steam Deck IMU support to the HID-Steam kernel driver for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of the Steam Deck controller.

The patches by independent developer Max Maisel allow for the accelerometer and gyroscope features to be exposed to user-space via a separate evdev node with the HID-Steam driver, the kernel driver supporting the Steam Controller and Steam Deck input functionality.

This exposing of the Steam Deck IMU support via separate evdev nodes match the behavior of the Nintendo and PlayStation HID kernel drivers for exposing these motion sensors.

Steam Deck OLED


Valve recommends using the Steam Input API for accessing Steam Deck input controls such as the accelerometer/gyroscope while this is nice support for those not wanting to rely on Steam's API or adapting the Steam Deck for other non-gaming uses. The proposed HID-Steam patch has been successfully tested with the latest SDL2 / SDL3 libraries.

More details for those interested in this HID-Steam kernel driver work via the Linux kernel mailing list.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week