Session folders, tool and installer logs and the stores' log now all live under the
app's private files/logs instead of Download/DroidDeck, and every existing "Share
logs" action bundles them into one zip that goes through a final scrub.
- Where: LinuxRuntime.logDir() = files/logs; sessions keep their dated folders and
30-session pruning, tools/ and stores/ beside them. The "Logs" setting keeps its
meaning. Game save backups stay in Download/DroidDeck/Saves.
- Migration: at first start the old session folders, tools/ and loose logs move from
Download/DroidDeck into files/logs (Saves untouched), and every moved folder is
scrubbed under the current rules.
- Scrubbing: one rule set (SecretScrub) for the stores' log and the zip. The scrub
marker carries the rules version, so a rules change re-scrubs every folder at the
next start (in the background, a few at a time). Steam login account names and
emails, account-name fields, OAuth codes, tokens in URLs and private LAN
addresses are removed; Windows exception codes and server addresses are kept.
- Share: one zip of the current session folder plus the last 7 days of stores/ and
tools/, written to cache/share and handed to the share sheet.
A Stores section (rail, under Games; Setup › Stores gate) with each store's sign-in,
library, storefront shelves and a download queue. Each store has two tabs, Store and
Library, and Library filters to All or Installed; libraries open from a saved copy
and refresh in the background, with install sizes on every card. Games install to internal storage,
or a card chosen at Install time, and are registered in the Steam client as non-Steam
games, so they launch through Steam and droiddeck-proton from either the front end or
the client.
- Downloads: GOG, Epic and Amazon engines in Rust (app/src/main/rust/stores, built by
cargo-ndk, nothing compiled in the tree). One adaptive fetch core with a latency
brake, stalled-host handoff and every CDN a store offers. Per-stage progress,
pause/resume, two-step cancel that deletes, failed downloads kept for retry, a
foreground service with Wi-Fi and wake locks and notification controls.
- Games tab: store source chips (Steam, GOG, Epic, Amazon, Custom) and store art.
- Epic: per-launch exchange code from the app and from Steam's Play button,
"Epic sign-in (EOS)", "Launch offline", and a game's web links opened in Android's
browser for EOS consent. The EOS overlay crashed games and is left out.
- Cloud saves (GOG, Epic): pulled before launch, pushed after the game or the session
ends, no upload before a first download, conflicts never overwritten, backups both
ways.
- Logs: every store line redacted; the engine log goes to daily files.
* Make the Compatible Proton ARM64 the default and label compatible builds
The CompatToolMapping "0" default always points at DroidDeck's Proton
ARM64 tool, and per-game picks of adopted GE/CachyOS builds are kept,
including when the shortcuts writer remaps.
The tool is named after the Proton build it runs, Proton Experimental
ARM64 (Compatible), or Proton 11.0 ARM64 (Compatible) once that newer build
is installed. Adopted builds carry the same Compatible mark, read from a
string resource the app stages into the runtime, and the Proton page
explains which builds have the prefix fixes.
The registrar is renamed steam-compatibility and the tool
droiddeck-proton-arm64. Existing installs migrate on the next session: the
old tool directory is removed, every mapping that named it moves to the new
tool, and the retired bannerlator-steam-compat script is removed from the
runtime. CI and local packaging include the renamed script.
* Drop the duplicate R import left by merging main
* Add userspace ntsync for Proton on Android
Android kernels have no /dev/ntsync and its app policy refuses futex_waitv,
so every Proton 11 build here fell back to wineserver for every wait.
libblsession now serves /dev/ntsync itself: wineserver opens a memfd region,
each sync object is a timerfd that carries its slot, and the kernel ntsync
ioctls are answered in shared memory with futexes, following the kernel
driver's wake order. Valve's Proton Experimental ARM64, GE-Proton and
proton-cachyos use it unchanged.
Locks record their owner so a killed process cannot wedge the others,
signals are held off inside each critical section, dead processes and
exiting threads are swept, and object lifetimes follow close, dup2, dup3,
close_range and received descriptors.
Fast sync is on by default under Performance > Session fixes, and
PROTON_NO_NTSYNC=1 turns it off per game.
* Add droiddeck-esync as the default sync for Proton on Android
Without a kernel ntsync driver, Proton 11 builds here fell back to
wineserver for every wait. droiddeck-esync brings eventfd and shared-memory
sync to the exact Proton build a game runs on: a pack holds that build's
ntdll.so and wineserver with the patch series in tools/droiddeck-esync
applied, and the guest runs Proton from a shadow tree that links the stock
tool and swaps in those two files. A wineserver from a pack still prefers
/dev/ntsync when a kernel driver or droiddeck-ntsync is there.
Packs are built in Valve's SDK image from each release's own wine source
(Proton Experimental ARM64 tags, GE-Proton and proton-cachyos releases); the
control build must reproduce the release binaries byte for byte, and a
signed index lists the packs. The APK bundles the packs pinned in
release.env, the app fetches newer ones, and Steam's compatibility tool
picks the pack for each Proton build, so new Proton releases get packs
without an app update.
The ntdll side reads, writes and polls its eventfds with raw system calls,
so the guest's LD_PRELOAD wrappers stay out of the sync path. The server
abandons a mutex once a thread killed by TerminateThread has really exited
and when its process dies, and a mutex's owner and recursion count change
in one atomic step, so a killed owner cannot touch the next owner's count.
droiddeck-esync is on by default and PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 turns it off per
game; droiddeck-ntsync, the userspace ntsync, is now an opt-in toggle.
* Watch Valve's Proton releases and build droiddeck-esync packs for them
A scheduled workflow reads the Proton ARM64 builds Steam ships (anonymous
steamcmd app info) and the upstream source tags, compares them with the
previous watch state and starts the pack build for any build that has no
pack yet. The pack build applies the patch series with --fuzz=0 and runs a
smoke test of each new pack against the esstress suite before it is
published.
* Add droiddeck-fsync, keep Steam and the app on one Proton, fix DirectAudio
droiddeck-fsync: libblsession answers futex_waitv(2), which the app
sandbox refuses, in userspace, so Proton's own fsync runs on the stock
Proton files with no pack. Waiters register the words they wait on in a
table beside the fsync shared memory and sleep on a futex of their own;
FUTEX_WAKE on the fsync memory wakes the registered waiters. Slots carry
one owner word that the sweeper and the owner claim with a CAS, and the
mapping table is rebuilt under a lock held across the real munmap, so a
reused address or a recycled slot cannot lose a waiter. It stands in for
a Proton build without a pack (droiddeck-ntsync where fsync is off), takes
over for games with esync off, and the "droiddeck-fsync first" toggle
(BL_FSYNC_FIRST, also per game) puts it ahead of the packs. The games
Proton keeps off fsync and esync never get it. A launch into a prefix
whose wineserver is still running keeps that server's sync choice.
One Proton for Steam and the app: the Components page's Proton is the
default Steam uses, applied live through the client while Steam runs
(droiddeck-steam-compat) and at the next start otherwise; a choice made in
Steam's menu comes back to the app. Requests are ordered by a sequence that
never goes backwards, and the page no longer jumps back to the default
after a swap or restore.
DirectAudio: the wrapper wrote the driver key with its backslashes
stripped, so no game ever used DirectAudio. Wine 11 also loads a builtin
only from the prefix, so the driver is now linked into system32 and
syswow64 before "directaudio,pulse" is selected; mmdevapi falls back to
winepulse whenever DirectAudio cannot start.
* Pick esync, ntsync or fsync from the Steam settings' Games group
A three-way tab row above the FEX preset sets the sync Proton games use. It
writes the existing switches together (droiddeck-ntsync, droiddeck-fsync
first, droiddeck-esync), so the Performance toggles and the tabs always agree,
starts on esync and keeps the choice until it is changed again.
* Make droiddeck-fsync the default sync for Proton games
A fresh install, or one that never picked a sync, starts on fsync; a choice made
in the Steam settings' Games group still sticks. Games Proton keeps off fsync
still fall back to droiddeck-esync.
* Add wineserver to the Wine sync tabs and order them ntsync, fsync, esync, wineserver
wineserver turns every in-process sync off so games wait through wineserver;
picking any other tab turns sync back on. The tabs shrink to fit a narrow pane.
* Shorten the Wine sync description
* Answer openat2 and execveat for FEX in the session preload
FEX opens every file of its x86 rootfs with openat2(RESOLVE_IN_ROOT) and
only falls back to the host path on EXDEV. Under proot on Android openat2
answers ENOSYS, so each lookup of an x86 library silently went to the host
and missed. The exported syscall() now turns openat2 into openat once the
real call reports ENOSYS: RESOLVE_IN_ROOT paths are taken relative to the
root fd (FEX has already resolved the links inside the rootfs), and an
absolute path under RESOLVE_BENEATH fails with EXDEV as the kernel would.
execveat with an absolute path, or relative to AT_FDCWD, and without
AT_EMPTY_PATH or AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW, is plain execve; it is sent as such
because proot refuses execveat with a directory fd, which FEX uses when it
re-executes itself for a child x86 program.
* Run x86 Linux games and programs through FEX
Steam: Linux-only titles that have no ARM64 build (from the client's
appinfo cache: type game, demo, application or beta) are mapped to a new
compatibility tool, droiddeck-fex ("Linux x86 (FEX)", linux to linux,
no required runtime). Valve's own "fex" tool needs pressure-vessel, which
cannot run under proot, so a mapping to it or to a Steam Linux Runtime is
replaced; any other pick the user made stays. Titles that also ship for
Windows stay on Proton. When such a title is installed and FEX or the
sniper runtime is missing, the client is asked to install them.
droiddeck-fex runs the program under the FEX that Steam installs (app
3127680), with Steam Linux Runtime 3.0 (sniper, app 1628350) as the x86
rootfs:
- the sniper platform is linked in place from its usr-mtree (relative
links only, files/usr -> .), once per runtime version;
- the x86_64 and i386 builds of libblsession and libfakeinput go into the
runtime's lib/<triplet>/droiddeck and its etc/ld.so.preload, mirroring
the session's own list, so x86 programs get the pads and the session
fixes (FEX passes their system calls straight to the kernel, so the
ARM64 preloads cannot reach them);
- Config.json sets RootFS and the GL and Vulkan thunks, so x86 games draw
with the device's Turnip and Mesa;
- the FEX preset and the game's own environment from the Steam settings
apply, and ARM64 entries are dropped from LD_PRELOAD/LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
It also links ~/.steam/sdk64 and sdk32 to the client's x86 steamclient
when the client has one and nothing is there yet.
Desktop: x86_64 and i386 AppImages can be imported now; they unpack
through FEX (or unsquashfs) and record their architecture. Scripts,
AppImages and programs started in a run session use FEX automatically
when they are x86, and each added app has a "Use FEX" Auto/On/Off choice
in its edit dialog. The launchers' "still running" checks also look at
FEX processes, whose exe is FEX rather than the program. A GitHub release
without an ARM64 AppImage falls back to its x86_64 one. Decky's x86
loader starts through droiddeck-fex instead of the fex-mesa rootfs path,
which no runtime ships.
The x86 preloads are built against glibc 2.31 (Debian 11) so they load
in sniper: tools/linuxfs/build-x86-preloads.sh, run in CI and by
build_local.sh. fakeinput's stat hooks fall back to __xstat on a glibc
without a stat export, and mmap64 takes off64_t for the i386 build.
* Keep a FEX unixlib from outliving its DLL
A FEX package or original bundle without the aarch64-unix helpers left
the previous version's libarm64ecfex.so / libwow64fex.so in the Proton,
so the new DLLs loaded a unixlib built for another FEX. A swap now removes
the helpers the package does not carry; FEX then runs DLL-only, which it
already falls back to when Wine cannot load the unixlib.
* Fix the Wine sync choices an audit found
- wineserver tab: it passed Proton's environment through, so a build with
esync built in (GE, cachyos) still ran esync and a kernel ntsync would
still be used. It now sets PROTON_NO_ESYNC, PROTON_NO_FSYNC and
PROTON_NO_NTSYNC (unless the game's own environment sets them).
- ntsync tab: a Proton whose wineserver has no /dev/ntsync client got
wineserver-only sync although fsync would work. The hash cache records
whether the wineserver has one; without it the launch goes to
droiddeck-fsync, and no stand-in or pack turns droiddeck-ntsync on.
- A build with esync built in returned before the per-game fallbacks, so
a game that turns esync off ran with no in-process sync. It now gets
droiddeck-fsync, or droiddeck-ntsync where fsync is off too.
- When a pack's proton cannot start and the stock one is used, or the
selection fails, the prefix's record now says stock, so a second
launch into the same running prefix no longer picks the pack's ntdll.
- droiddeck-fsync: its mutex is held across fork and re-made in the
child, a closed or replaced shm fd is forgotten (close, dup2, dup3,
close_range, closefrom), and a waiter woken while it was leaving on a
timeout or signal reports the wake instead of losing it.
- BL_SYNC_MIN_NOFILE applies per game to every verb, debug logs carry
prefixes.json, the device report names the chosen sync instead of the
three raw switches, and PATCHES.md and the proot notes describe the
selector, the fsync default and droiddeck-fsync's futex_waitv.
* Name the runtime's scripts and files droiddeck, migrating old installs
The guest scripts are droiddeck-* now (droiddeck-session and the other 19),
as are the files the app and scripts generate (etc/droiddeck, the network
state files, the components dir, the Steam install stamp, the redist marker,
the extra-Proton wrapper and backups) and the compositor's own names
(libdroiddeckwayland, droiddeck_* sources, DROIDDECK_* switches, the
wl_output and seat names).
Installed runtimes carry on: LegacyNames moves etc/bannerlator and
share/bannerlator over and leaves relative links at the old paths before
every proot command, turns any old script into a link to its new name,
moves the generated files and points menu entries at the new scripts.
The session scripts and steam-compatibility move their markers on first
use, the components dir's desired.tsv is rewritten with it, and the
runtime counts as installed under either session script.
Kept: the banner_ahb_v1/banner_desktop_v1 wire names and BANNER_AUDIO_DIRECT
(read by prebuilt Turnip and Wine builds), Banners-Turnip and other
third-party names, BL_* switches, libblsession, and credits to Bannerlator.
* Unpack x86 AppImages without FEX, then ask Steam for FEX
Importing an x86 AppImage failed when FEX was not installed yet ("needs FEX
to unpack and no unsquashfs is installed"). AppImages now unpack with
uruntime (VHSgunzo, MIT, v0.8.1 aarch64, pinned by sha256 and shipped
unmodified with its licence), which reads SquashFS and DwarFS images of any
architecture natively. FEX's own --appimage-extract and unsquashfs stay as
fallbacks, and an ARM64 image whose own runtime cannot unpack it goes the
same way.
An x86 import with FEX missing records that FEX is wanted, so the next
Steam session requests FEX and the Steam Linux Runtime, and the program's
page says FEX is not set up yet and how to get it.
* Run Vulkan Qt Quick AppImages on Wayland
OpenNOW (Qt 6.8, Qt Quick on Vulkan) closed within two seconds in a run
mode. The session sends toolkits to gamescope's Xwayland, and Qt's xcb
backend only presents with Vulkan when Mesa's X11 WSI does, which needs
DRI3; Xwayland on KGSL has none, so Qt found no queue that can present and
aborted ("Failed to create RHI").
An AppImage that bundles Qt Quick, the Vulkan loader and Qt's Wayland
plugin now runs on gamescope's Wayland socket (the desktop's, outside
gamescope), where Turnip presents as it does for games, with Qt's xcb
backend as the fallback. SDL_VIDEODRIVER and XDG_SESSION_TYPE follow, so
helpers that pick their window system from them (OpenNOW's streamer) agree
with Qt. Everything else stays on X11; a qt file in the app's directory
(wayland or xcb) overrides the choice.
* Keep gamescope's WSI layer away from Qt apps on its Wayland socket
OpenNOW still closed at once: its FFmpeg (the Raspberry Pi fork, libavutil
61) creates its Vulkan queues internally synchronized whenever the driver
offers VK_KHR_internally_synchronized_queues, which DD-Turnip does. The
gamescope WSI layer registers every queue of a new device through
vkGetDeviceQueue, which only returns queues created without flags, so it
got VK_NULL_HANDLE and vkroots aborted on assert(obj) before Qt opened a
window.
Programs that draw on gamescope's Wayland socket do not need the layer,
which only carries X11 windows past Xwayland, so it is turned off for
them. OpenNOW bundles no Vulkan loader (it reaches Vulkan through Qt and
dlopen), so a binary that uses QVulkanInstance counts as a Vulkan app too,
and a Qt Quick app left on X11 says why in the session log.
* Keep the end of the session log, and say when FEX is missing
The session sends its output through head -c into session.log. head
writes through stdio, so it held up to 4 KB that proot's --kill-on-exit
threw away when the guest ended: every log stopped mid-line at a 4096-byte
boundary, losing exactly the lines that say why a program quit (an x86
AppImage's "x86 Linux programs need FEX" among them). dd writes each read
as it comes and keeps the same cap.
A run mode always ends with status 0 (gamescope does not pass its child's
on), so a program that could not start just closed. When the log says FEX
is missing, the ended screen now says so and how to get it.
The app reads FEX's readiness from status.json, which only a launch or an
import wrote, so it still said "not set up" after Steam installed FEX.
droiddeck-fex status rewrites it, and a Steam session ends with it while
FEX is wanted. FEX is also looked for at the tool's root and under files/,
and a tool folder without it lists what it holds.
* Let FEX and its runtime install runnable on an SD card library
A Steam library on shared storage loses the executable bits, so native
tools are staged in private directories bound over it; only Proton and
SteamLinuxRuntime folders were. FEX (3127680) installed there could never
run, droiddeck-fex saw no FEX and kept asking Steam for it. FEX and the
sniper runtime (1628350) now get private directories from their first
download, whatever their install folder is called.
* Keep fsync off in the pack smoke test
A runner whose kernel allows futex_waitv started stock Proton with fsync,
so the server-side baseline never said what the test waits for and every
pack was waved through as untestable; the esync run would have measured
fsync too.
* Judge a pack against stock's own esstress failures
Stock Proton fails esstress's dup wait all under server-side sync as well
(a Wine bug, seen on the phone too), and any stock failure made the test
call the runner unusable. A pack now fails only when it crashes, hangs or
fails a check stock passes.
* Ask Steam for FEX and its runtime one at a time
Both steam://install requests were started together, and the running client
took only the first: FEX installed, the sniper runtime FEX needs never did.
Each request now waits for the client to take it before the next.
* Bundle the first published droiddeck-esync packs in the apk
* Log how an x86 program under FEX ends
FEX keeps its own errors quiet unless asked, so a program it could not run
left nothing in the session log. Its log now goes to stderr, and the AppImage
launcher records the program's exit status or the signal that ended it.
* Show the log a failed AppImage program wrote
Programs like Eden stop themselves on a failed check and say why only in
their own log under the home folder. When the program ends badly, the end of
any log it wrote during the run is copied into the session log.
* Report where an x86 program under FEX hit an illegal instruction
A tiny x86_64 preload, built without libc, catches SIGILL and writes the
address, the instruction bytes and the mapping they belong to before the
program dies as it would have. droiddeck-fex preloads it into x86_64 programs.
* Load the fault reporter from the x86 runtime
Programs under FEX look libraries up in the x86 runtime, so the reporter is
copied there with the other preloads and named by its path inside it.
* Hand FEX its x86 runtime and thunks through the environment
Valve's FEX runs portable and reads its config beside itself, so the
Config.json droiddeck-fex writes was not seen: programs ran without the
runtime. The runtime, thunk libraries and thunk list now also go in FEX's
own environment variables, and each launch says what it was given.
* Use the sync pack built for the installed Proton release
Some Proton releases ship byte-identical ntdll.so and wineserver (Valve
11.0-2b/2c, CachyOS 0702/0703), so a pack built for a newer release
matched an older install exactly and the older install never fetched its
own pack. A pack from a newer release no longer counts as an exact match;
among matches the one built for the installed version wins, then rev.
The app ranks the pack a tool already uses the same way and only fetches
a pack that ranks higher, reads the release epoch from tools.tsv and
refetches when tools.tsv changes. A prefix whose server is still running
re-checks its recorded pack on waitforexitandrun and starts fresh when a
better one now applies.
* Keep published sync packs and revocations consistent
The publish step never replaces a pack that has an entry beside it; a
pack left without its entry by an interrupted run is replaced so the
build stops repeating. Discovery counts revocations the signed index does
not show yet, including superseded packs only the flavor releases list,
so the index is signed again. The release watch always builds every
flavor.
* Fetch the droiddeck-esync packs from DroidDeck-Components
The packs, the signed index and the apk bundle now live in the releases
of Droid-Deck/DroidDeck-Components, together with the pipeline that
builds them, so this repository keeps only the app and the guest code
that consumes them. The app's index and asset URLs point there,
release.env names the repository its bundle comes from, and the apk
builds drop bundled packs that the published index revokes.
* Stop the apk build when the published sync index cannot be read
* Ask Steam for one FEX dependency at a time
The client shows a confirmation dialog for each steam://install, and a
second request replaces the first dialog, so FEX was never installed
when the runtime was requested right after it. The next dependency is
now requested once the previous one has an app manifest.
* Use generic names in the AppImage test fixtures
* Give x86-64 apps under FEX the Vulkan thunk
Apps that bring their own glibc and Vulkan loader skipped FEX's thunk
overlay and loaded their bundled desktop Mesa drivers, which crash on the
phone's GPU during Vulkan setup. droiddeck-fex now adds an x86-64 audit
module when a program's bundled glibc and libstdc++ meet the thunk's
version needs. The module sends libvulkan.so.1 lookups to a nodelete stub
that needs FEX's thunk path. That keeps the thunk mapped when an app
unloads Vulkan and loads it again, since FEX keeps its first trampoline
links and the old addresses get reused.
The fault reporter now restores the default action before re-raising,
because FEX ignores SA_RESETHAND and the handler looped.
* feat(lsfg): take Lossless Scaling from Steam by itself, import it once owned, rebuild on update
- Lossless.kt owns the DLL and its shader cache. The copy the Steam
client installs (runtime library or the card's) is taken by itself
and taken again when the client updates it (size/mtime stamp). The
DLL is copied in and built into a cache named after its SHA-256, so
a new DLL hands the compositor a new path; a build that fails keeps
the working cache. Builds are serialized.
- The Steam session asks the signed-in client once per session whether
the account owns app 993090 until the answer is yes, then records it
and the app stops asking (BL_LOSSLESS_OWNED). Once owned, the frame
generation menu offers "Import Lossless.dll…", on the main screen and
in the session drawer; an import stays until Steam's copy changes.
- The compositor restarts the LSFG engine when its cache path changes,
and a new engine selection clears an earlier start failure, so an
updated DLL or a retry no longer needs the app restarted.
- The HUD says when LSFG is waiting on Lossless Scaling instead of
"starting"; frame generation strings are resources.
- Removed LsfgNative's unused DLL variant and cache-match calls.
* Find Lossless.dll in added Games libraries too
* LSFG: 120, 90 and 60 fps targets alongside 2x-4x
The pacer's target-rate mode picks 0-3 generations per game frame. While it
is warm the input ring and shared chain follow every frame, so frames that
generate nothing don't leave the next one without history.
* Credit LSFG: Camille LaVey / Eden, ported to WinNative and DroidDeck by @maxjivi05
* LSFG: aim 0.1 fps under the target so output never passes the refresh rate
* feat: run Flatpak apps through a proot bwrap stand-in and add a Flathub store
* feat: give Flatpak apps the KGSL GPU, the controllers and a CPU LLVM can target
* feat: Flatpak games on the desktop, Store apps on the Desktop page, safer remove
* test: cover the sandbox planner and store helpers; docs: explain Flatpak on DroidDeck
* fix: keep controller focus through Store tabs and app pages; show progress per Flatpak step
* fix: let Chromium, Electron and Firefox Flatpaks start without their own sandboxes
* fix: fetch Flatpak's supporting libraries when the runtime lacks them
* fix: add Flathub without a download, log store commands, keep Electron apps on X11 under gamescope
* feat: import ARM64 AppImages from storage and run them from the Desktop page
* fix: report failed Flatpak installs as failures and deploy runtimes that ship a resolv.conf link
* fix: let Flatpak create its repo where Android denies hard links
* fix: point store commands at the current network's DNS
* fix: keep failed Flatpak extensions non-fatal, give Electron AppImages a bus, X11 and time to relaunch
* docs: AppImage import and what x86 apps would take
* feat: put the Flathub Store and AppImage import behind beta toggles in Setup
---------
Co-authored-by: MaxsTechReview <[email protected]>
App name, app ID and code package: DroidDeck, com.droiddeck.launcher
(sources moved to com/droiddeck/launcher, the 68 JNI functions renamed
with them). The new app ID installs beside SteamDeck rather than over it.
Everywhere the name was the app's own: the sidebar title, the session
report, share zips, the shell title, wake-lock and log tags, User-Agents,
the Compose theme, the Download folder and switch files (droiddeck-env,
-osc, -driver, -tu-debug, -no-pad, -pad-log, -no-hud, -wlr-renderer; the
old names are not read), and inside the runtime (droiddeck-desktop,
Firefox's droiddeck.js, the shortcuts tag, the rumble socket, debug and
cache paths). Build scripts, CI artifact (droiddeck-apk), CMake project,
README and the progress log follow.
Kept on purpose: Valve's Steam Deck (the -steamdeck flag,
steamdeck_publicbeta/stable, 'Steam Deck mode', the steamos.cloud
package URLs) and names inside the hosted desktop package (steamdeck.png,
steamdeck-steam, steamdeck-bigpicture). 'Desktop installed' now tests for
labwc instead of the launcher the app stages itself. A committed
__pycache__ .pyc is removed.
The five files the audit measured as Winlator's are replaced: a one-method callback interface by
java.util.function.Consumer, the component base by SessionPart (attach an application context,
start, stop), the environment list by HostEnvironment, the process starter by HostProcess, and
the pad's state holder by PadState with named sticks, triggers, directions and buttons. The
frame-generation tree is framegen/ (its contents were never Winlator's: lsfg-vk's port and
Bannerlator's Win-FG), the log tags are the app's, and the fake pad's rumble socket is now one
the app actually serves: RumbleComponent turns a game's force-feedback effects into the phone's
vibrator, which used to go nowhere. The two design notes describing Bannerlator's X11 path are
gone, and the README and credits say what is whose.
The client already writes one menu entry per installed game (steam steam://rungameid/<id>, with
the game's icon); they were dead for want of a steam command, and r45 added a second entry per
game beside them. Now: steam on the desktop is a shim that hands off to bannerlator-steam-launch
(and is the client itself anywhere else), and bannerlator-desktop-games writes an entry only for
a game the client wrote none for.
bannerlator-desktop-games writes one menu entry per installed game (both libraries, the
client's own artwork) and links Steam Games / SD Games in the home folder. The entries, and the
menu's Steam / Big Picture ones, run bannerlator-steam-launch: the client cannot draw on the
desktop (labwc, no dma-buf), so it leaves a request in the session directory; the service
watches it (FileObserver), ends the desktop session and hands the activity a Steam session to
start - desktop UI (BL_STEAM_UI=desktop drops -gamepadui) with the game's rungameid URL.
The choice belongs inside the client - the drive drop-down on Install, Settings > Storage - so
the app no longer needs a setting for the common case. Default = automatic (the first SD card
present); the cog keeps Internal only and a chosen folder.
The runtime already knew how to register /mnt/bannerlator-sd with the client; the app never
bound anything there, so the client only ever saw internal storage. The Steam cog's Game storage
section offers every removable volume (through the app's own folder on it, the one place a card
lets a targetSdk-28 app write) and any folder from the File Manager, proven writable first. The
session binds the choice and names it (BL_LIBRARY_LABEL); bannerlator-steam-library registers it,
or forgets it when nothing is bound. The client does the rest: asks where to install, shows both
on Storage, moves games between them. device.txt records the choice.
RPCS3 on the desktop died at its first frame with VK_ERROR_SURFACE_LOST: labwc composites in
software (pixman) and initialises no dma-buf, so no Vulkan program on the desktop can get a
swapchain. The GPU path that works is gamescope's, which Steam's games already render through.
MODE_RUN starts a program inside the runtime as a session of its own under gamescope (the
script's run mode: AppImage, script or binary), taking Steam's display/driver/HDR settings; the
apps dialog offers ▶ for every installed emulator (AppImages, PPSSPP, RetroArch).
Volume Up/Down/Mute were forwarded to the guest as keys and never reached Android, so the
device's volume never changed during a session; they now fall through, on the media stream.
The file picker is now Bannerlator's File Manager itself (files/FileManagerScreen.kt, carried over
whole with its rail, favourites, grid/list, copy/cut/paste, rename, delete, properties) minus what
has no meaning without a Wine container: run, add to shortcuts, C:/Z: drives, the archive
unpacker. StorageRoots, CollapsibleRail, FavoritesStore, PeIconExtractor, OutlinedAlertDialog and
MenuStyle come with it unchanged; FileOps carries the progress copy/move. A Files tile opens it;
its pick mode chooses the ROMs folder and imports drivers.
Play and Desktop each get a cog: resolution cap (1080p default, 900p, 720p, panel), shape, HDR10,
the mode's Linux runtime driver, the display driver, touch, and per mode the on-screen controls +
audio (Steam) or the renderer (desktop). The Graphics drivers and Audio tiles are gone into them.
HDR10: HdrSupport reads the panel's HDR types; the switch is greyed with the reason unless HDR10 is
listed. On, the activity feeds the compositor's gate (nativeSetHdrDisplay + nativeSetHdrRequest),
turns zero-copy on, sets BANNER_WAYLAND_HDR=1, and the session gets BL_HDR=1 (gamescope
--hdr-enabled) and DXVK_HDR=1.
OrphanReaper kills every process of our uid but the app at session start and on an app crash: a
tree left by a killed app held the rootfs, the GPU and Steam's lock, and the next session never
came up (Thor Pro report). The drawer gains Steam menu, which sends the Guide button.
A program's file dialog inside the session never showed the phone: internal storage was bound
at its own path, but proot binds do not appear in /proc/mounts and nothing under home pointed at
it. Every session now binds internal storage at /root/Storage and the folder chosen with the new
ROMs folder tile at /root/ROMs - a bind, so a folder on an SD card works the same.
Folder and file choosing is the app's own picker (files/), Bannerlator's File Manager pick mode
carried over: StorageRoots verbatim for the drive menu, the same intent API (InAppFilePicker),
folders first, an up-arrow floored at the volume root, the last folder remembered. Both driver
imports use it instead of the system document picker.
A session folder is finished whichever way the session ends: SessionArtifacts is shared by the
ordinary stop, an uncaught-exception handler (App/CrashHandler, writes crash-app.txt and finishes
the folder before the process dies) and a sweep at the next app start for a folder without its
.complete marker (a kill or a native crash), which gets ended-without-teardown.txt and the crash
buffer. A Session logs tile turns the folder off: it then lives in the cache and is deleted at
the end.
The main menu is two columns of tiles, each with its setting's value under its title.
The Steam client builds Settings > Internet and its connection indicator on
NetworkManager and looks for one on the system bus as it starts. This runtime
had neither, so the page stopped with "StartScanningForNetworks is not a
function" under a header that showed no connection while downloads ran. A user
on an Odin 2 reported exactly that, and I told him it was cosmetic and unfixed -
wrongly: Max wrote the answer for WinNative (e7a224ae) and Bannerlator has
carried his port for days. This app was the only one without it.
The session now starts a small system bus and his stand-in, which reports one
connection that is up while Android has a route out and refuses what it cannot
do, since nothing here can scan for or join a network. Both the script and the
bus config come from the apk at every launch, so an installed runtime gets this
without a re-host; dbus-daemon and python-gi are already in r9.
Named bannerlator-netmanager rather than steamdeck-: CI copies
overlay/usr/local/bin/bannerlator-* by glob, so anything else would have been
built, committed and never packaged - the same shape as the proot artifact that
was produced and discarded on every run for a week.
Version 0.1.3, and the README gains a section for it.
The README had grown a section per feature in the order they were written, and
the parts that describe the whole had fallen behind: it still said version 0.1,
the ledger listed none of the drivers, audio, cores, session fixes or logs, and
the architecture diagram showed neither the audio relay nor that there are two
Turnips with two import lists.
Now: the ledger covers everything the app does with an honest state against
each - and says outright where something sets what it claims but has never been
measured; the diagram shows both driver slots and where a game's audio can go;
the session-log folder has a section of its own instead of being an appendix to
the device switches; and Installing mentions the one Android setting that
decides whether a session stays up at all, since that has cost two people an
afternoon.
Closes the four gaps that were left after the session folder: everything the
app itself decided was reaching logcat and nowhere a user can get at, sound had
no record at all, the network had none either, and a session the system killed
left its only trace in a buffer nobody was reading.
app.log mirrors this process's logcat for the length of the session - which
driver was chosen and why, the audio line, a rival client stopped, a helper
missing, the exit status. An app may always read back its own entries, so this
needs no permission; where a ROM refuses, the file says so rather than being
absent and looking like silence.
crash.log is Android's crash buffer at teardown. proot once died before main
over a missing library and said so there and in no other log, and a session the
OS kills for spawning children says it there too.
audio.log takes the PulseAudio daemon's output and the relay helper's, both of
which went to logcat only. The 17.0-module failure that cost the microphone a
whole round of builds would have been one line in this file.
network.txt records the transport, whether the link validated, the address
families, the DNS the system offered and the resolv.conf the runtime was
actually given - never the network's name, which is identifying. It also states
plainly that the client's own "wifi is off" is cosmetic, since that reading has
now cost two people an afternoon.
Left out on purpose: a Vulkan dump. It needs a new native entry point for
information wayland.log already carries on its first lines.
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".
xalia is an x86 Windows program Proton launches to give Windows programs
gamepad navigation. Under FEX it cannot load the session's aarch64 preload
shim, so its socket() and memfd calls reach the vendor's seccomp filter raw -
and where that answers ENOSYS, measured on a Galaxy Fold, it storms: 89
refusals of each in a few seconds, then a broken Wayland pipe and a session
that is gone 6-12 seconds after Big Picture appeared. Fourteen sessions in
eighteen minutes died that way on one device while the same build ran for
minutes on another.
Proton has its own gate for it, PROTON_USE_XALIA, so the switch sets that
rather than interfering with the helper. Off by default: xalia is Valve's, and
on a device whose seccomp answers its syscalls normally there is no reason to
take it away.
The two tunables the Fold experiment needs, as switches under Performance
rather than files in Downloads: TU_DEBUG=sysmem for the runtime's Turnip and
ZINK_DESCRIPTORS=lazy for the client's menus. The Downloads files still win.
Downloads/steamdeck-env holds KEY=VALUE lines that go into the session's
environment as written, after the app's own, so a line here wins. For a device
that cannot be reached with a debugger and an experiment that would otherwise
cost a build per attempt: Zink and Turnip tunables, gamescope's, the client's.
The case at hand is a Fold whose Steam menus run at 14 fps on the A8xx Turnip
while a game on the same session runs at 89 - the client's Chromium goes
through ANGLE and Zink, and ZINK_DESCRIPTORS=lazy is the first thing to try.
A Steam session runs two things that want different cores at the same time,
and one affinity cannot serve both (Bannerlator cfca3912).
The client is the case that prompted it: Steam pins its own interface renderer
to a subset of cores it chooses - five of eight on one device, leaving out both
little cores and the fastest one - reasonable while a game is running and wrong
when the client is all there is, where it shows as Big Picture feeling sluggish.
BL_CLIENT_CPUS overrides it, re-applied on a beat by the session script because
steamwebhelper spawns children continuously and each inherits Steam's choice.
That block is Bannerlator's, verbatim. One deliberate difference: the client's
mask is sent whenever the override is on, even when it names every core,
because undoing Steam's pin is the whole point and the scheduler's default is
exactly what that pin takes away.
A game gets BL_GAME_CPUS instead, consumed by the Proton wrappers that r27
already carries, and as in Bannerlator it is sent only when it is a real
restriction: a list naming every core is what the scheduler does unaided.
Both live behind a Performance dialog with a checkbox per core, labelled with
its ceiling, and apply at the next session start.
Two opt-ins on a new Audio screen, both ported from Bannerlator's gamescope
runtime where they are proven with voice in Steam's own tester.
DirectAudio replaces the audio driver inside the games the client launches -
Wine's mmdevapi driver, glibc build - with one that talks to a helper on the
Android side over a unix socket. The client keeps PulseAudio either way: it is
a native Linux program with no other way to make a sound. The helper runs here
because nothing inside the session can open Android's audio: a game is a glibc
process in a rootfs that binds no /system, and the uid the helper runs under is
what the recording permission is checked against.
The microphone is its own opt-in. The helper opens the input stream only when
asked and writes it to a pipe; PulseAudio's module-pipe-source turns that into
a source the client sees as DirectAudioMic. The daemon makes the pipe and the
helper waits for it - the two used to race, and the module fails on EEXIST.
The Proton wrappers gain Bannerlator's bl_directaudio, which adds the driver's
directory to WINEDLLPATH and names the driver in the prefix, and refuses on any
Proton that is not Wine 11 rather than pair a driver with an interface it was
not built against, which would be silence rather than an error. bl_game_cpus
comes along in the same splice and is inert until BL_GAME_CPUS is set.
The driver is staged into the runtime at every launch like the session scripts;
the helper ships as libdirectaudiorelay.so beside the PulseAudio daemon. Both
are the binaries Bannerlator carries, built by The412Banner/directaudio's relay
workflow (linux-wine11 build against ValveSoftware/wine proton_11.0).
Turnip's debug flags reach the runtime's driver and everything on it through
TU_DEBUG. Downloads/steamdeck-tu-debug now sets it verbatim, like the other
device switches. With nothing there, an imported driver from the A710/A720/A722
legs gets "sysmem" on its own: both the patch's author and our release notes
advise it for those GPUs, and nothing else in the list needs it.
Kurt Himebauch