Steam-on-Ampere

Summary

This how-to explains how developers can run Steam on Ampere Altra with x86 emulation via box64/box86.

Overview

ADLINK and Ampere want to contribute to awareness that developers can have a powerful Arm development environment for a wide variety of applications inside and outside the data center. And to know about the ability to have an x86 Linux user space on Ampere Altra via box64/box86 which provides an x86 emulation layer. To support this ADLINK is donating an Ampere Altra Developer Platform workstation to the box64/box86 project for more experimentation and continued improvement of that popular open source project.

We think the "how to" below will be interesting for developers. Ampere Altra Developer Platform is is a great fit for developers, especially ones developing for Arm-based clouds, systems, and devices. This is why Ampere Altra Dev Platform (a.k.a. "AVA Dev Platform") became the developer platform for the SOAFEE open source Software-Defined Vehicle program. Despite the NVIDIA GPU support and RGB lighting, its focus isn't playing games.

Much thanks to our ADLINK friends for this! This is part of efforts for Ampere on Edge.

Running Steam on Ampere Altra

Steam is a video game digital distribution service and storefront from Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide game updates automatically for Valve's games, and expanded to distributing third-party titles in late 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)

The bummer is that the Steam portal that runs on Linux is purely coded for x86/amd64 based system, that is why the Steam Deck is based on AMD.

So could it work on arm64 at all ??

Yes it can !!

And it runs quite stable on arm64 when using the x86 emulation tools available to us today.

How to get it operational is the first step in this journey and how to get it optimized will be an ongoing story in this document

For the system we have been using to try this out we started with a quite moderate configuration :

• AADP32 with 2x 16GB DDR4
• NVIDIA RTX 4080 (Ada), RTX A6000 (Ampere), RTX 3060 (Ampere), RTX 6000 (Turing)

The below software installation covers :

• Getting a desktop on Ubuntu server
• Manually installing Nvidia arm drivers
• (correctly) Installing the x86 and amd64 emulation layers
• Installing Steam

This will provide you with a setup that allows you to tryout games that are enabled for Linux (x86/amd64 that is)

"Soon" to come

• A list of programs that have been tested under the non-wine install : " working / not working"
• Integration with wine to allow Windows games to run on Linux
• Proton, other optimization ?

Setting up the GPU accelerated Desktop

Please follow instructions in this document to setup Nvidia GPU enabled desktop.

Installing Box86 and Box64 emulation

Box86 is an emulator for x86 userspace tools on ARM Linux systems, allowing such systems to execute video games and other programs that have been compiled for x86 Linux systems. Box86 is an alternative to QEMU for user-mode emulation. Box86 also provides dynamic recompilation as well as functionality to intercept dynamic library calls and forward them to equivalent native libraries, allowing applications to run significantly faster than if they were fully emulated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box86

Very detailed instructions can be found on the github site of the developer https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86

Box 86 is an amazing achievement and although the focus for box86 and box64 is now on gaming it might have many more application down the road.

Box86 homepage : https://box86.org/

To keep it simple and easy to reproduce we choose here to install the online debs because there are too many dependencies to fulfill manually to compile box86, that depends on the armhf architecture and box64 that supposedly depends on the standard arm64 architecture.

Box86

We use @Itai-Nelken's apt repository to install precompiled box86 debs, updated weekly.

sudo wget https://itai-nelken.github.io/weekly-box86-debs/debian/box86.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/box86.list
wget -qO- https://itai-nelken.github.io/weekly-box86-debs/debian/KEY.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/box86-debs-archive-keyring.gpg
sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
sudo apt update
sudo apt install box86:armhf -y
# Run the following command if needed
# sudo apt --fix-broken install

Note that we are installing box86:armhf, do not install box86

Box64

We use @ryanfortner's apt repository to install precompiled box64 debs, updated every 24 hours.

$ sudo wget https://ryanfortner.github.io/box64-debs/box64.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/box64.list
$ wget -qO- https://ryanfortner.github.io/box64-debs/KEY.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/box64-debs-archive-keyring.gpg
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install box64-generic-arm -y
$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt

Installing Steam

Use the following to install steam.

$ git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
$ cd box86
$ ./install_steam.sh

Run Steam

Start Steam with the following command and login to start Steam.

$ /usr/local/bin/steam

Enable Proton for Playing Windows-only games

To play Windows-only games, either wine emulator or proton emulator is needed. Steam comes with proton as such it is just a few click away to play Windows-only games.

Open the setting dialog box.

Select Compatibility button at left panel and check Enable Steam Play for all other titles. Optionally, configure Proton version as desired.