For Linux Enthusiasts Especially, The Steam Deck Is An Incredible & Fun Device

[bemerk]

I hear you need to run everything through steam to get proper controller input activated. Is that a problem of missing driver support for the steam decks controller hardware in the kernel ?

[Adarion]

Kudos to Valve for this nice little machine and for this Linux commitment. Maybe one day this will even feature some kind of Coreboot (libre Coreboot). Well, maybe that is something worth to save some money for.

[Volta]

That could only have happened if Nvidia made CPUs. Which they were trying to do by buying ARM.
That deal got blocked by government, so no Nvidia Steam Deck for you!

Furthermore, there are no valid Open Source nvidia drivers and I think it matters.

[Linuxxx]

You can shout neo-nazi "Urkaine uber alles" and "death to the enemies" for a little more time, later on only in the internet.

Now ain't that funny:

You accuse your own brothers & sisters of being neo-nazis while simultaneously starting all-out warfare & threatening to terrorize them after a potential Pyrrhic victory!

So, tell me, which side was the neo-nazi one again?

[brucethemoose]

What, why?
Also, no, not gonna happen. nVidia does not have an x86 based APU, and there is no way Valve (or any other manufacturer) will put a discrete GPU in a handheld device.

TBH Nvidia Orin or even Xavier would work fine in a handheld if Nvidia/Valve subsidized emulation some. Even then, open source projects seem to be making good progress with out them.


The real issue is cost... the Nvidia dies are simply too big, and Nvidia is asking too much.

[yump]

Interestingly enough the Steam Deck is relying on "acpi-cpufreq" instead of "AMD P-STATE" for its CPU driver, contrary to what was communicated months ago.

Guess the combination with "schedutil" as the intended governor is still a joke & something to be ashamed of...

I expect the Deck will be a great proving ground for getting schedutil into a better state.

1. It's vendor-supported hardware.
2. It's cheap, there aren't 1001 different variants that are only sold by through specific channels, and there's a ton of attention on it so the BoM is unlikely to change without anyone noticing. There's a good chance that developers collaborating on cpufreq issues will be able to get access to the same hardware.
3. There are two independent ways to measure the power consumption without external tools. And because of 1 and 2, there's a strong chance that those ways will be validated against external tools in short order.
4. In typical use, power consumption is dominated by the SoC, not the peripherals, so governor behavior matters.
5. The governor is required to minimize energy for a guaranteed quality of service for hours, in a large variety of applications. Not just the nebulous "responsiveness" and 3-4 preinstalled apps that can be uclamped into usability (as in the Android world).
6. The CPU shares power budget with the GPU, so perfgov cannot be used to paper over bad behavior or dismiss the importance of CPU frequency scaling (by users or developers).

[brucethemoose]

Interestingly enough the Steam Deck is relying on "acpi-cpufreq" instead of "AMD P-STATE" for its CPU driver, contrary to what was communicated months ago.

Guess the combination with "schedutil" as the intended governor is still a joke & something to be ashamed of...

And speaking of things to be ashamed of:

Slava Ukraini!

Oh that is interesting.

TBH it could be a BIOS blunder, which is the situation with many AMD laptops (including my Asus G14). But in that case, apathy is the only thing stopping the OEMs from fixing it, so maybe Valve will notice and ask the mobo vendor to do something about it?

Anyway, p-state + schedutil already seems to work quite well in TDP-limited mobile devices.

[smitty3268]

TBH Nvidia Orin or even Xavier would work fine in a handheld if Nvidia/Valve subsidized emulation some. Even then, open source projects seem to be making good progress with out them.


The real issue is cost... the Nvidia dies are simply too big, and Nvidia is asking too much.

I'm doubtful using ARM for a handheld would make much sense for Valve, when it's main selling point is compatibility with x86 games.

Even Apple's emulation right now struggles with gaming, and when it does work performance appears to not be very good. (Again, for gaming purposes)

[Quackdoc]

I'm doubtful using ARM for a handheld would make much sense for Valve, when it's main selling point is compatibility with x86 games.

Even Apple's emulation right now struggles with gaming, and when it does work performance appears to not be very good. (Again, for gaming purposes)

I could be mistaken, but Im pretty sure the big bottleneck is gpu horse power. I remeber seeing native vs rosetta to be pretty decent. not close to native, but decent.

[login]

How's sleep/resume? Everything working fine after resume? Sleep battery drain? For the Deck UI, can you have a lock screen when resuming (haven't seen this in coverage I've read so far where they've only shown resuming the game they were playing without entering a password on wake up)?