Gaming on Linux

[MadMage999]

Hi all.

It's me again.

I have been fiddling around with gnu/linux since slackware came on floppy disks, but never come around to sticking with it for a variety of reasons, all which could be resolved given time and effort, except the crown jewel.

I love to game. And linux just didn't have the game titles.

Well a few things have changed in the fairly recent timespan, one is steam on linux (yay!) and now any and all windows games, even ones with no linux port, can be downloaded and installed under steams custom wine image (is that the right term?) which I think is a huge leap.

Also for those titles that just absolutely won't run on linux even with wine and playonlinux, etc. I've discovered IOMMU and passthrough of physical hardware to VMs.

For me this is the tipping point, finally I can escape windows and keep it in jail while I settle in. I kind of chose kubuntu awhile back and I still like it best.

There are still some hurdles, though. I've been playing with VMM (kvm/qemu) and I really like the ease of installing and setting up coupled with fine grained control, big kudos to the people who put it together. However I've noticed VMs hanging under VMM and I'm starting to wonder if this is going to be ongoing.

In any case, this is just a commentary and sort of introduction since I am planning on sticking around awhile.

Let me know if there's things I could be doing better. I haven't spent a ton of time on a forum like this, and I am hoping not to make my self a nuisance. I try to research first then ask, and work the problem, etc. I'm looking forward to helping others where I can, and I want you to know I appreciate the insights you share.

[otisklt]

I have been using native linux games on steam for a bit now and they are typically working great. DyingLight is one exception for me where the native port does not work properly. The game will load but nothing but black screen at the main menu.

Just started playing around with SteamPlay / Proton (the valve wine fork) and am getting mixed results.
For the valve whitelisted games list I have not tried any yet. -edit fixed I was wrong with what I originally said.
For the games not whitelisted yet I was able to run Skyrim well, ( this site has a good listing and user feedback on working state from a variety of users/builds: https://spcr.netlify.com/ ) I tried No Man's Land and while the game loads, it is not playable since after the game has loaded up a save I get white screen and some game icons. The game menu / config to change video settings works fine but no luck on actual playable game yet. Others are seeming to have better luck, maybe nvidia mostly.

For reference I have an AMD RX480 8GB card and have loaded Mesa 18.3 which valve recommends: ( https://store.steampowered.com/steamplay )

I have not played with VMs enough to give any feedback on that end at least in terms of gaming.

[MadMage999]

Nice to make your acquaintance otiskit.

I have just now ordered the iommu fully enabled hardware which will let me test my theories about using kubuntu as a hypervisor for windows 7, macos X, and various flavors of linux with application stacks and management tools.

The relevant part is the windows 7 VM, I will report my experiences with virtual box and VMM (Qemu/KVM).

[GreyGeek]

Welcome to KFN, MadMage999

KFN, email, browsing and gaming is about all I do with my box. The games are java based (Minecraft mainly), Python based (SAGE modeling, Solitaire) and Steam (Team Fortress and UniverseSandbox^2). Haven't run Castle Story or Portal 2 in years. I don't think they are supported any more. A big problem with gaming under Linux is that game developers use the free Linux environment and help, then take the game to Windows and won't support Linux. With Windows declining market share that attitude is beginning to change.

[MadMage999]

Hello again, GreyGeek.

I tend to play a lot of RAGE, Fallout series type games, and then switch gears to things like Civilization 5, Age of Empires series, Tropico 4.

I recently was trying to get Neverwinter Nights 2 Complete (GOG) going on playonlinux, but the recipe they have uses a really old wine version and there seemed to be dependency problems.

Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with their windows 10 antics. I flat out refuse to use it. I use windows 7 for the games that I can't get going on Kubuntu, and that's okay with a little help from netlimiter. Netlimiter allows me to approve any incoming or outgoing connection from any source, that way I can reign in the telemetry they've backported to 7.

The situation of people using free software and then ignoring the community is deplorable, I read a blog post the other day where a guy was trying to justify making money off free software and I can understand wanting/needing to be paid for ones work, but he seemed to not get the ethos of doing work for the good of all and in turn benefiting from the work of others. It's not always about money and I think there's a right and wrong way to make money, certainly one must respect the free software community.

[GreyGeek]

Well stated.

It's the Win10 antics that, on top of past abuses with VISTA and 8 that are driving people away from Microsoft, in addition to their WinPhone fiasco, and their use of Legal Intercept to spy on people using Skype. I also see that they are, contrary to their promise, are edging Minecraft away from the Java version and to a Windows only focus on mod development. IF it weren't for Forge the Java version of Minecraft would die. As it is, Forge and OptiFine are better than anything MS has now on their WinCraft version and for the foreseeable future the Java version is the best going. SO MANY good mods available for the Java/Forge version too.

[MadMage999]

Speaking of proton, I wish gog.com would get on the linux bandwagon, too.

I'd love to see a compatibility layer for non-linux games the way they package dosbox with good settings for the particular title for older games.

[GreyGeek]

Speaking of proton, I wish gog.com would get on the linux bandwagon, too.

I'd love to see a compatibility layer for non-linux games the way they package dosbox with good settings for the particular title for older games.

I haven't tried it but isn't gog.com attempting to use proton by connecting your steam account to gog?
https://www.gog.com/connect

[MadMage999]

I haven't tried it but isn't gog.com attempting to use proton by connecting your steam account to gog?
https://www.gog.com/connect

From the page you linked: "You'll be able to permanently import all the games listed below to your GOG.com library".

Looks like it lets you import steam games to your gog library, so that they're DRM-Free.

[MadMage999]

Wow!!! There are now 1,695 games with at least one "platinum" status reported on https://spcr.netlify.com/.

This is steam play on linux, btw.

[GreyGeek]

Wow!!! There are now 1,695 games with at least one "platinum" status reported on https://spcr.netlify.com/.

This is steam play on linux, btw.

Wow! Indeed!
I've been watching Ethos and VinteageBeef play No Man's Sky on YouTube and it is among those 1,695 games. This first listing in the report is a box similar to mine.

https://spcr.netlify.com/app/275850

[MadMage999]

Wow! Indeed!
I've been watching Ethos and VinteageBeef play No Man's Sky on YouTube and it is among those 1,695 games. This first listing in the report is a box similar to mine.

https://spcr.netlify.com/app/275850

Interesting. I just got an older i7 for the IOMMU capabilites of the motherboard, but no joy so far with PCI passthrough. Every time I start a VM with my GPU passed through, it falls down and goes Ka-Boom.

From what I'm seeing, at least in the not far-off future, I won't need to futz with it. :-D

[GreyGeek]

My Acer V3-771G has a secondary NVidia GT 650M which cannot be set as primary in the BIOS. The nvidia-390.48 driver configures it as primary and I run all my games on my desktop without using a VM (because I could never get my GT 650M to behave in a VM). I run Btrfs, so before I install any new games or applications from the repository, or anywhere else, I create snapshots of @ and @home (/ and /home). If nothing breaks or appears fishy after the install and a week or so of usage, monitoring for sockets to unrecognized IP addresses, I create new snapshots. Btrfs makes falling back to a previous snapshot child's play.

[MadMage999]

Cool. Yeah, I think I've mastered the minor art of installing kubuntu to btrfs as / over the last few days. I had the built-in video card on my HP 8200 Elite CMT as primary (as opposed to the Radeon RX 550 in the first PCIE x16 slot) in the bios and that caused all kinds of problems.

It would initialize one monitor but not the other (each monitor is on a separate card for PCI passthrough) or oddly enough, ask me for the live session user's password?!? Setting the onboard video back to secondary fixed that.

Also, it seems that installing kubuntu to a drive with only a btrfs partition taking up the entire drive on UEFI boot causes you to need extra partitions? I might have been able to get it going with something as simple as an EFI system partition, not sure, but I was in a rush to get some kind of workable system going, so I focused on the simpler answer, and got my machine to boot the kubuntu installer I had flashed to USB stick as an MBR device, which required a BIOS update for some reason, but saved me futzing around with the partition scheme. Just created a btrfs partition taking up the entire drive and added the other drives with btrfs from the command line (EDIT after the install was finished), then issued a balance command to convert to raid 0.

Gotta say, the more I deal with btrfs, the more impressed I am. However I did read an article today that said redhat had deprecated btrfs? I don't know how seriously to take that.

[GreyGeek]

.....

Gotta say, the more I deal with btrfs, the more impressed I am. However I did read an article today that said redhat had deprecated btrfs? I don't know how seriously to take that.

They did, probably for several reasons but none related to Btrfs because SUSE, UBUNTU, Debian, Oracle and other distros support Btrfs. Oracle strips the trademarks from RH, adds Btrfs and sells it as "Unbreakable Linux". The original developer of Btrfs, Chris Mason, moved from Oracle to Facebook to support its use of Btrfs. So, the use of Btrfs is increasing, not declining. Here are several possible reasons why RH is leaving Btrfs:
https://www.itwire.com/open-source/4...le-novell.html
https://www.itwire.com/open-sauce/79...ing-btrfs.html

That citation above points out that by restricting Oracle's access to kernel patch modifications they may be, and probably are, violating the GPL, which could get them cut off from the kernel.

One former RH engineer said this:

People are making a bigger deal of this than it is. Since I left Red Hat in 2012 there hasn't been another engineer to pick up the work, and it is _a lot_ of work.

For RHEL you are stuck on one kernel for an entire release. Every fix has to be backported from upstream, and the further from upstream you get the harder it is to do that work.


Btrfs has to be rebased _every_ release. If moves too fast and there is so much work being done that you can't just cherry pick individual fixes. This makes it a huge pain in the a**.


Then you have RHEL's "if we ship it we support it" mantra. Every release you have something that is more Frankenstein-y than it was before, and you run more of a risk of **** going horribly wrong. That's a huge liability for an engineering team that has 0 upstream btrfs contributors.


The entire local file system group are xfs developers. Nobody has done serious btrfs work at Red Hat since I left (with a slight exception with Zach Brown for a little while.)


Suse uses it as their default and has a lot of inhouse expertise. We use it in a variety of ways inside Facebook. It's getting faster and more stable, admittedly slower than I'd like, but we are getting there. This announcement from Red Hat is purely a reflection of Red Hat's engineering expertise and the way they ship kernels, and not an indictment of Btrfs itself.

RH is going to something called "Stratis".

Stratis is a volume-managing filesystem (VMF) like ZFS and Btrfs. It starts with the central idea of a storage "pool," an idea common to VMFs and also standalone volume managers such as LVM. This pool is created from one or more local disks (or partitions), and volumes are created from the pool. Their exact layout is not specified by the user, unlike traditional disk partitioning using fdisk or GParted.

VMFs take it a step further and integrate the filesystem layer. The user no longer picks a filesystem to put on the volume. The filesystem and volume are merged into a single thing—a conceptual tree of files (which ZFS calls a dataset, Btrfs a subvolume, and Stratis a filesystem) whose data resides in the pool but that has no size limit except for the pool's total size.

RH started working on it 1 1/2 years ago. Work on Btrfs started in 2007 and on ZFS development started in 2001. Btrfs was announced stable in 2014. I suspect that RH will be supporting Btrfs on its existing customer base for years to come while it brings Stratis to an enterprise level.

Before I retired in 2008 I installed a RH sever at work. It cost my employer $1,500/yr for support, which was by phone or email. Very expensive if a RH tech was required on site, but none was ever needed. I needed help only one time because the tar binary could not make a tar file bigger than 2GB, and backing up RH at the time was by making tar files and copying them to archive drives. I posted the support ticket on their website. At the same time I went to a free website supported by users of RH who did their own fixing. Within two hours I got a reply with links to two websites. THREE DAY LATER I got a reply from RH which contained the same two links. I had to modify my tar script so that each tar file compressed no more than 2GB.

I was curious about access to the source and went to the site that was given in RH's very cheap 3 ring binder which was chuck full of man page printouts. You read me right. On that site was one giant (at the time) zip file. Download it and unzip it you had about 700+ tar files. Inside each tar file was a zipped file. Unzip it and you had the source file. As a roadblock that unzipping and untarring was a waste of time because a simple bash script could do it in a single command sequence. However, what was NOT included in the files was any documentation on their development setup, file hierarchy, the tools they used and their compile steps and parameters. IF one was trying to recreate the binaries and compare them with the distributed binaries it wasn't really possible. The guy who developed CENTOS compiled their sources his way but, I understand, he got the hierarchy and binaries to match.